At the beginning of July, a few of us gathered in Washington DC for the first hidden service hackfest. Our crew was comprised of core Tor developers and researchers who were in the area; mostly attendees of PETS. The aim was to push hidden service development forward and swiftly arrive at decisions that were too tiresome and complex to make over e-mail.

Since we were mostly technical folks, we composed technical proposals and prioritized development, and spent less time with organizational or funding tasks. Here is a snapshot of the work that we did during those 5 days:

The first day, we discussed current open topics on hidden services and tasks we should be doing in the short-to-medium-term future. Our list of tasks included marketing and fundraising ones like "Re-branding hidden services" and "Launch crowdfunding campaign", but we spent most of the first day discussing Proposal 224 aka the "Next Generation Hidden Services" project.

Proposal 224 is our master plan for improving hidden services in fundamental ways: The new system will be faster, use better cryptography, have more secure onion addresses, and offer advanced security properties like improved DoS resistance and keeping identity keys offline. It's heavy engineering work, and we are still fine-tuning the design, so implementation has not started yet. While discussing how we would implement the system, we decided that we would need to write most of the code for this new protocol from scratch, instead of hooking into the old and rusty hidden service code. To move this forward, we spent part of the following days splitting the proposal into individual modules and figuring out how to refactor the current data structures so that the new protocol can coexist with the old protocol.

One open design discussion on proposal 224 has been an earlier suggestion of merging the roles of "hidden service directory" and "introduction point" on the hidden service protocol. This change would improve the security and performance as well as simplify the relevant code, and reduce load on the network. Because it changes the protocol a bit, it would be good to have it specified precisely. For this reason, we spent the second and third days writing a proposal that defines how this change works.

Another core part of proposal 224 is the protocol for global randomness calculation. That's a system where the Tor network itself generates a fresh, unpredictable random value everyday; basically like the NIST Randomness Beacon but decentralized. Proposal 225 specifies a way that this can be achieved, but there are still various engineering details that need to be ironed out. We spent some time discussing the various ways we can implement the system and the engineering decisions we should take, and produced a draft Tor proposal that specifies the system.

We also discussed guard discovery attacks, and the various defenses that we could deploy. The fact that many core Tor people were present helped us decide rapidly which various parameters and trade-offs that we should pick. We sketched a proposal and posted it to the [tor-dev] mailing list and it has already received very helpful feedback.

We also took our old design for "Direct Onion Services" and revised it into a faster and far more elegant protocol. These types of services trade service-side location privacy for improved performance, reliability, and scalability. They will allow sites like reddit to offer their services faster on hidden services while respecting their clients anonymity. During the last days of the hackfest, we wrote a draft proposal for this new design.

We did more development on OnioNS, the Onion Name System, which allows a hidden service operator to register a human memorable name (e.g. example.tor) that can be used instead of the regular onion address. In the last days of the hackfest we prepared a proof-of-concept demo wherein a domain name was registered and then the Tor Browser successfully loaded a hidden service under that name. That was a significant step for the project.

We also discussed hidden service statistics and how the two statistics we implemented a few months ago have been very useful. To improve their reliability (since currently only about 3% of the network reports them), we decided to enable them by default in the future. We also discussed systems for collecting additional statistics in a privacy-preserving manner, using Secure Multiparty Computation or other similar techniques.

We talked about rebranding the "Hidden Services" project to "Onion Services" to reduce "hidden"/"dark"/"evil" name connotations, and improve terminology. In fact, we've been on this for a while, but we are still not sure what the right name is. What do you think?

To improve user education, we explored various concepts for a graphical animation explaining hidden services similar in concept to the Tor animation from a few months ago.

And that's only part of what we did. We also wrote code for various tickets, reviewed even more code and really learned how to use Ricochet.

All in all, we managed to fit more things than we hoped into those few days and we hope to do even more focused hackfests in the near future. Email us if you are interested in hosting a hackfest!

If you'd like to get involved with hidden service development, you can contact the hackfest team. Our nicks on IRC OFTC are armadev, asn, dgoulet, kernelcorn, mrphs, ohmygodel, robgjansen, saint, special, sysrqb, and syverson.

Until next time!