[tor-dev] prop224: Ditching key blinding for shorter onion addresses

[George Kadianakis]

bancfc at openmailbox.org writes:

> [ text/plain ]
> On 2016-07-29 17:26, George Kadianakis wrote:
>> Hello people,
>> 
>> this is an experimental mail meant to address legitimate usability 
>> concerns
>> with the size of onion addresses after proposal 224 gets implemented. 
>> It's
>> meant for discussion and it's far from a full blown proposal.
>> 
>> Anyway, after prop224 gets implemented, we will go from 16-character 
>> onion
>> addresses to 52-character onion addresses. See here for more details:
>> 
>> https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/224-rend-spec-ng.txt#n395
>> 
>> This happens because we want the onion address to be a real public key, 
>> and not
>> the truncated hash of a public key as it is now. We want that so that 
>> we can do
>> fun cryptography with that public key. Specifically, we want to do key 
>> blinding
>> as specified here:
>> 
>> https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/224-rend-spec-ng.txt#n1692
>> 
>
>
> Speaking out of turn here:
>
> Why not integrate kernelcorn's OnioNS project and keep all the current 
> security properties?
>
> OnioNS addresses are much more user friendly than even the shorter 
> .onion addresses.

Hello bancfc,

AFAIK, the OnioNS project was never actually finished nor deployed.

It also has various engineering/deployment issues that have not been addressed
and it requires a whole infrastructure/community to work.

In general, I'm open to DNS-like approaches for hidden services, but if we can
also improve the UX situation on the protocol layer, that seems like a win to me :)