Onion url's

[Michael Gomboc]

HHHow do I access Tor hidden services? ¶ <#HowdoIaccessTorhiddenservices>

Tor hidden services are named with a special top-level domain (TLD) name in
DNS: .onion. Since the .onion TLD is not recognized by the official root DNS
servers on the Internet, your application will not get the response it needs
to locate the service. *Currently, the Tor directory server provides this
look-up service; and thus the look-up request must get to the Tor network.*

Therefore, your application *needs* to pass the .onion hostname to Tor
directly.
You can't try to resolve it to an IP address, since there *is* no
corresponding IP address: the server is hidden, after all!

So, how do you make your application pass the hostname directly to Tor? You
can't use SOCKS 4, since SOCKS 4 proxies require an IP from the client (a
web browser is an example of a SOCKS client). Even though SOCKS 5 can accept
either an IP or a hostname, most applications supporting SOCKS 5 try to
resolve the name before passing it to the SOCKS proxy. SOCKS 4a, however,
always accepts a hostname: You'll need to use SOCKS 4a.

Some applications, such as the browsers Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari,
support sending DNS queries to Tor's SOCKS 5 proxy. Most web browsers don't
support SOCKS 4a very well, though. The workaround is to point your web
browser at an HTTP proxy, and tell the HTTP proxy to speak to Tor with SOCKS
4a. We recommend Polipo as your HTTP proxy.

For applications that do not support HTTP proxy, and so cannot use Polipo,
FreeCap <http://www.freecap.ru/eng/> is an alternative. When using FreeCap? set
proxy protocol to SOCKS 5 and under settings set DNS name resolving to
remote. This will allow you to use almost any program with Tor without
leaking DNS lookups and allow those same programs to access hidden services.

See also the question on
DNS</projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#HowdoIcheckifmyapplicationthatusesSOCKSisleakingDNSrequests>
.


See also:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ


Regards,

Michael

2010/11/18 <zzzjethro666 at email2me.net>

>
>  hi
> Can someone tell me exactly what is the apparatus that resolves an onion
> URL?
> Is it a server that holds all the onion addresses, a software or what?
> Thanks
>



-- 
Michael Gomboc
www.viajando.at
pgp-id: 0x5D41FDF8
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