[tor-onions] Connection to a hidden service with a RFC 6455 web-socket - advice on risks please

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2018 at 07:27:32PM +0000, Michael Jonker wrote:
> They have asked me to ask here also if, when connected to a hidden service,
> the circuit becomes "dirty" after default 10 minutes and resets?

No, onion services use the opposite logic: once you open a circuit to
the onion service, the 10 minute timer starts, and if you open a new
stream you *reset* the timer to a fresh 10 minutes. So as long as you
keep using it, it will stay open.

If 10 minutes pass and you didn't attach a new stream, Tor won't try to
put new streams on that circuit in the future (i.e. it will try to open
a new one).

This 'opposite logic' is actually the same logic that Tor Browser uses
for its circuits, since it uses the socks isolation feature where the
goal is to separate requests between domains, rather than to separate
them between time slots:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/src/or/circuituse.c#n2713

--Roger