Hi everyone,
So I have an idea which may or may not be a possibility. Currently Tor Onion Services do not need HTTPS since they are already end to end encrypted. That said multiple layers of crypto cannot hurt, Facebook for example uses this approach. So I have the idea of some sort of mechanism that lets you sign a self-signed tls certificate with your Onion Service's hs_ed25519_secret_key and Tor Browser trusting the tls certificate based on this signature. Would this approach work? Would it be worth the effort? Look forward to hearing your thoughts :)
Cordially, Nathaniel Suchy
"That said multiple layers of crypto cannot hurt, Facebook for example uses this approach."
The first part is not strictly true. For the second part, FB uses an identity-verified EV cert from a known CA to let their users confirm their identity, not for increased encryption. Creating an onion service is essentially creating a self-signed cert, so no, I'd say not worth the effort to do it again at the HTTP level.
Chad
On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 11:17 AM Nathaniel Suchy me@lunorian.is wrote:
Hi everyone,
So I have an idea which may or may not be a possibility. Currently Tor Onion Services do not need HTTPS since they are already end to end encrypted. That said multiple layers of crypto cannot hurt, Facebook for example uses this approach. So I have the idea of some sort of mechanism that lets you sign a self-signed tls certificate with your Onion Service's hs_ed25519_secret_key and Tor Browser trusting the tls certificate based on this signature. Would this approach work? Would it be worth the effort? Look forward to hearing your thoughts :)
Cordially, Nathaniel Suchy _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
sign a self-signed tls certificate with your Onion Service's hs_ed25519_secret_key and Tor Browser trusting the tls certificate based on this signature
- In unlikely case tor crypto fails or breaks, e2e TLS is good there. - An admin might terminate onions on one box, and forward the plaintext off to other places, e2e TLS is good there. - Onionland does have some PKI, CA, pinning, and tor signing infrastructures. - Admins might want to play, learn, and do it just because they can.
The browser either has options to import and trust an onion sig over a cert, or you need to add it, or skip it and use today's typical cert methods.
The concepts apply to both v2 and v3 onions.
Would this approach work?
Manually for you, and by users, loading and configuring things, yes. Automagically, browser would need to fetch pubkeys from controller hsdir consensus, observatories, or other methods.
Would it be worth the effort?
For whatever ca / pki structures are already good for, or not. And might help against the rewriting onion proxies...
-
Chad Retz -
grarpamp -
Nathaniel Suchy