[tor-dev] adding smartcard support to Tor

[Ivan Markin]

Razvan Dragomirescu:
> Ivan, according to https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en
> (maybe I misunderstood it), at Step 4, the client sends an _encrypted_
> packet to the hidden service, so the hidden service needs to be able to
> decrypt that packet. So the key on the card needs to be used both for
> signing the HS registration and for decrypting the packets during the
> initial handshake, isn't this correct?

Not exactly. The trick is that keys are not the same. For more details
have a look at the specifications [1]. There is a "permanent key"
("holds the name", signs descriptors) and an "onion key" [2] for each
Introduction Point to communicate with the HS. So the "nameholder" key
("permanent") is used only for signing descriptor with a list of IPs and
corresponding keys.

> As far as I could tell, there is no way to tell Tor to use a smartcard in
> any phase of the protocol, your OnionBalance tool simply handles the
> registration by itself (outside of Tor).

Yes, there is no support for SCs in little-t-tor itself.
What OB is doing is just a combining some IPs (from backend instances)
into frontend instance descriptor, signing it and then publishing it via
tor.

btw, OnionBalace is not my project [3].

> Regarding bandwidth, this is for an Internet of Things project, there's
> very little data going back and forth, I only plan to use the Tor network
> because it's a very good way of establishing point to point circuits in a
> decentralized manner. The alternative would be to use something like PubNub
>  or Amazon's new IoT service, but those would depend on PubNub/Amazon.

As I said before it may not fit your purpose. :) I still don't think
that decrypting via SC is necessary. If somebody already knows your
backend keys then certainly they know any of your data on this machine.
Maybe I missed something.


[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-spec.txt#n63
[2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-spec.txt#n364
[3] https://github.com/donnchac/onionbalance
-- 
Ivan Markin
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