tor/doc/spec/proposals/121-hidden-service-authentication.txt

Filename: 121-hidden-service-authentication.txt
Title: Hidden Service Authentication
Version: $LastChangedRevision$
Last-Modified: $LastChangedDate$
Author: Tobias Kamm, Thomas Lauterbach, Karsten Loesing, Ferdinand Rieger,
        Christoph Weingarten
Created: 10-Sep-2007
Status: Open

Change history:

  26-Sep-2007  Initial proposal for or-dev
  08-Dec-2007  Incorporated comments by Nick posted to or-dev on 10-Oct-2007

Overview:

  This proposal deals with some possibilities to implement authentication
  for restricted access to hidden services. This way we try to increase the
  security level for the service provider (Bob) by giving him the ability
  to exclude non-authorized users from using his service. It is based on
  proposal 114-distributed-storage but is better suited for a fine grained
  way of authentication, because it is less resource-consuming. Whenever we
  refer to service descriptors and cell formats, we are talking about the
  definitions found in 114-distributed-storage unless otherwise stated.

  We discuss password and public-key authentication for the Onion Proxy
  (OP) of Bob's hidden service (HS). Furthermore a challenge-response
  authentication mechanism is introduced at the introduction point.

  These modifications aim at:
   - increasing the security of hidden services by limiting access only to
     authorized users (specification see details) and
   - reducing the traffic in the network by rejecting unauthorized access
     requests earlier.

Motivation:

  The currently used implementation of hidden services does not provide any
  kind of authentication. The v2 implementation adds an authentication
  mechanism at the directory server. Security can be further improved by
  adding two more authentication authorities at the introduction point
  (IPo) and the OP.

  Although the service descriptors are already designed to carry
  authentication information the existing fields are not used so far.
  Moreover one can find a couple of notes at the specification of cell
  formats (rend-spec) which point at adding authentication information but
  no fields are specified yet. It would be preferable to extend the Tor
  network with authentication features to offer a solution for all
  services. This would also provide means to authorize access to services
  that currently do not support authentication mechanisms. Moreover, Bob's
  authentication administration for all services could be performed
  centralized in the Tor application, and the implementation overhead for
  developers would be significantly reduced. Another benefit would be the
  reduced traffic by checking authentication data and dropping unauthorized
  requests as soon as possible. For example unauthorized requests could
  already be discarded at the introduction points.

  In addition to that, our implementation is able to hide the service from
  users, who still have access to the secret cookie (see
  114-distributed-storage) but should no longer be authorized. Bob can now
  not only hide his location, but also to a certain degree his presence
  towards unauthorized clients given that none of his IPo's are corrupted.

Details:

  [XXX Restructure this section in separate patch:
   A) The general mechanisms to perform authentication at three
      authentication points (directory, service, introduction point)
   B) A specific authentication protocol based on secret cookies. -KL]

  [XXX Describe use of descriptor cookie as "/0/ Client authentication at
   directory". Optional encryption/decryption using a descriptor cookie is
   understood since proposal 114, but not used by servers and clients. -KL]

  /1/ Client authentication at the hidden service

  In proposal 114 a client (Alice) who has a valid secret cookie, which may
  be considered as a form of authentication, and a service ID is able to
  connect to Bob if he is online. He can not distinguish between Alice
  being intentionally authorized by himself or being an attacker.
  Integrating authentication in Tor HS will ensure Bob that Alice is only
  able to use the service if she is authorized by him.    

  Authentication data will be transmitted via the RELAY_INTRODUCE1 cell
  from Alice to Bob that is forwarded by the IPo. For this message several
  format versions are specified in the rend-spec in section 1.8. We will
  use the format version 3, which is specified, but not implemented by
  December 2007. This specification already contains the fields
  "AUTHT" (to specify the authentication method), "AUTHL" (length of the
  authentication data), and "AUTHD" (the authentication data) that will be
  used to store authentication data. Since these fields are encrypted with
  the service's public key, sniffing attacks will fail. Bob will only build
  the circuit to the rendezvous point if the provided authentication data
  is valid, otherwise he will drop the cell. This will improve security due
  to preventing communication between Bob and Alice if she is an attacker.
  Especially, it prevents the attack described by Øverlier and Syverson in
  their paper "Locating Hidden Servers", even without the need for guards.
  As a positive side effect it reduces network traffic because it avoids
  Bob from building unnecessary circuits to the rendezvous points.
  Authentication at the HS should be the last gatekeeper and the number of
  cases in which a client successfully passes the introduction point, but
  fails at the HS should be almost zero. Therefore it is very important to
  perform fine-grained access control already at the IPo (but without
  relying on it).

  The first authentication mechanism that will be supported is password
  (symmetric secret) authentication. "AUTHT" is set to "1" for this
  authentication method while the "AUTHL" field is set to "20", the length
  of the SHA-1 digest of the password.

  (1) Alice creates a password x and sends the password digest h(x) to Bob
      out of band.
      [XXX Don't distinguish between x and h(x), so that both Alice and Bob
       can be the initiator of the password exchange. -KL]
  (2) Alice sends h(x) to Bob, encrypted with Bob's fresh service key (not
      subject to this proposal, see proposal 114).
  (3) Bob decrypts Alice's message using his private service key (see
      proposal 114) and compares the contained h(x) with what he knows what
      Alice's password digest h(x) should be.

  This kind of authentication is well-known. It has the known disadvantage
  of weak passwords that are vulnerable to dictionary or brute-force
  attacks. Nevertheless it seems to be an appropriate solution since safe
  passwords can be randomly generated by Tor. Cracking methods that rely on
  guessing passwords should not be effective in the constantly changing
  network infrastructure. A usability advantage is that this method is easy
  to perform even for unexperienced users. The authentication data will be
  the SHA-1 secure hash (see tor-spec) of the shared secret (password).

  The premise to use password authentication is that Bob must send the
  password to Alice -- or the other way around -- outside Tor.
  If at the same time the secret cookie is
  transmitted and the message is intercepted the attacker can gain access
  to the service. Therefore, a secure way to exchange this information must
  be established.

  [Removed public-key authentication protocol. -KL]

  After validating the provided "AUTHD" Bob builds a circuit to the
  rendezvous point and starts interacting with Alice. If Bob cannot
  identify the client he must refuse the request by not connecting to the
  rendezvous point.
  [XXX Bob should discard an IPo after a certain number of cells containing
   bad auth data. But any denouncement by other IPos or clients, e.g. by
   replaying cells, must be inhibited. Maybe Bob should keep a history of
   connection attempts within a certain time and discard an IPo after a
   specific threshold. And maybe authentication to the service should be
   based on a nonce, so that the service can differentiate between a replay
   attack by an introduction point and regular reconnection attempts. More
   thoughts needed here. -KL]

  It will also still be possible to establish v2 hidden services without
  authentication. Therefore the "AUTHT" field must be set to "0". "AUTHL"
  and "AUTHD" are not provided by the client in that case.

  /2/ Client authentication at the introduction point 	

  In addition to authentication at the HS OP, the IPo should be able to
  detect and abandon all unauthorized requests. This would help to raise
  the level of privacy and therefore also the level of security for Bob by
  better hiding his online activity from unauthorized users. Especially if
  Alice still has access to the secret cookie. This can be the case if she
  had access to the service earlier, but is no longer authorized or the
  directory is outdated. Another advantage of this additional "gate keeper"
  would be reduced traffic in the network, because unauthorized requests
  could already be detected and declined at the IPo.

  It is important to notice that the IPo may not be trustworthy, and
  therefore can not replace authentication at the HS OP itself. Nor should
  the IPo get hold of critical authentication information (because it could
  try to access the service itself).

  A challenge-response authentication protocol is used to address these
  issues. This means that a challenge is needed to be solved by Alice to
  get forwarded to Bob by the IPo.

  Two types of authentication are supported and need to be preconfigured by
  Bob when creating the service: password and public-key authentication.
  Again it is up to Alice what kind of authentication mechanism she wants
  to use, given that Bob knows both her password and her public key.

  If Alice uses a password to authenticate herself at the IPo, the
  authentication is based on a symmetric challenge-response authentication 
  protocol. In this case the challenge for Alice is to send h(x|y) where x
  is a user-specific password, which should be different from the password
  needed for authentication at the hidden service and y is a randomly
  generated value. Alice gets hold of her password out of band.

  With the initial RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cell, the IPo gets a list of
  h(x|y)'s which it stores locally. Upon a request of Alice it compares her
  provided authentication data with the list entries. If there is a
  matching entry in its list, Alice's request is valid and can be forwarded
  to Bob. To generate the hash, Alice needs to know the password (which she
  will get out of band) and the random value y. This value is contained in
  the cookie-encrypted part of the hidden service descriptor which Alice
  can retrieve from the directory using her secret cookie.

  (1) Alice creates a password x and sends the password digest h(x) to Bob
      out of band.
  (2) Bob creates a random value y, computes h(h(x)|y), and sends the
      result to the introduction point.
      [XXX There should be a separate y for each introduction point, so
       that none of them may impersonate Alice to any of the other
       introduction points. -KL]
  (3) Bob encrypts y with a secret cookie (see proposal 114) and writes it
      to a rendezvous service descriptor.
  (4) Alice fetches Bob's rendezvous service descriptor, decrypts y using
      the secret cookie (see proposal 114), computes h(h(x)|y), encrypts
      it with the public key of the introduction point, and sends it to
      that introduction point.
  (5) The introduction point decrypts h(h(x)|y) from Alice's message and
      compares it to the value it knows from Bob (from step 2).

  [Removed public-key authentication protocol. -KL]

  To remove a user from a group, Bob needs to update the random value list
  at the IPo's.

  The changes needed in Tor to realize these two challenge-response
  variations affect the RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO and RELAY_INTRODUCE1 relay
  cells, the service descriptor and the code parts in Tor where these cells
  and the descriptor are handled.

  The RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cell is now structured as follows:

  V      Format byte: set to 255             [1 octet]
  V      Version byte: set to 2              [1 octet]
  KL     Key length                         [2 octets]
  PK     Bob's public key                  [KL octets]
  HS     Hash of session info              [20 octets]
  AUTHT  The auth type that is supported     [1 octet]
  AUTHL  Length of auth data                [2 octets]
  AUTHD  Auth data                          [variable]
  SIG    Signature of above information     [variable]

  "AUTHT" is set to "1" for password/public-key authentication.
  "AUTHD" is a list of 20 octet long challenges for clients.

  The service descriptor as specified in 114-distributed-storage is used in
  our implementation.

  For password authentication "authentication" auth-type is set to "1" and
  auth-data contains the 20 octets long string used by clients to construct
  the response to the challenge for authentication at the IPo.

  When using public-key authentication the auth-type is set to "2" and
  auth-data holds a list of 148 octets long blank separated values. The
  first 20 octets of each value is the hash of the public key of a certain
  client and used by Alice to determine her entry in the list. The
  remaining 128 octets contain the PK-encrypted token needed to
  authenticate to the IPo.
  [XXX Handle space limitation problem, either by using fewer space, by
   sending multiple cells, or by finding a protocol that is
   space-independent here. -KL]

  The part of the RELAY_INTRODUCE1 cell that can be read by the IPo has the
  following fields added:

  AUTHT  The auth type that is supported   [1 octet]
  AUTHL  Length of auth data               [1 octets]
  AUTHD  Auth data                         [variable]
  [XXX Insert a version field, so that we won't be facing the same problems
   again when specifying the next version of INTRODUCE1 cells. -KL]

  The AUTHT and AUTHL fields are provided to allow extensions of the
  protocol. Currently, we set AUTHT to 1 for password/public-key
  authentication and AUTHL to 20 for the length of the authorization token.

  [XXX Insert file format containing auth data here. -KL]

Security implications:

  In addition to the security features proposed in 114-distributed-storage
  a new way of authentication is added at the OP of Bob. Moreover, the
  authentication at the IPo's is improved to support a fine-grained access
  control. Corrupted IPo's may easily bypass this authentication, but given
  the case that the majority of IPo's is acting as expected we still
  consider this feature as being useful.

  Bob can now decide whether he wants to allow Alice to use his services or
  not. This gives him the possibility to offer his services only to known
  and trusted users that need to identify by a password or by signing their
  messages. The anonymity of the client towards the service provider is
  thereby reduced to pseudonymity.

  Changing of access rights now involves all three authorization authorities
  depending on what changes should be made:

    - The user configures his changes at the local OP. Therefore he can
      edit the cookie files that were extended to support multiple users.
      Moreover he can edit the new user files that were added to specify
      authentication information for every user.

    - Whenever local changes occur, this information needs to be either
      passed to the responsible IPo's, the directory servers, or both
      depending on the authorization method and operation used. It is
      important to have consistent authorization results at all authorities
      at the same time, to create a trustworthy system with good user
      acceptance. As these reconfigurations always follow local changes
      they can be done automatically by the new Tor implementation and
      therefore no user interaction is needed.

    - The secret cookies proposed in 114-distributed-storage are used for
      group management in our implementation as their use would be far to
      costly for a user-based authorization. That is because right now one
      descriptor is generated and uploaded for every secret cookie. Changes
      in this configuration should therefore be rare (maybe never) and only
      a few groups should exist. Provided that this is the case the costs
      for changes seem acceptable. As there is currently no possibility to
      make a directory remove the descriptor for a group an updated
      descriptor without any IPo should be uploaded to the directory
      servers.

  Local changes to access rights can now be done faster than by changing
  service descriptors which reduces the directory server load and network
  traffic. Still every configuration change remains costly and users should
  carefully choose how detailed the access right configuration should be.

  Attacking clients now need to bypass two more authentication steps to
  reach the service implementation. Compared to the current state it is
  more likely that attackers can be stopped even before they are able to
  contact Bob's OP. We expect that the possibility of an attack is thereby
  significantly reduced. Another positive side effect is that network
  traffic and router load is reduced by discarding unauthorized cells which
  should lower the effectiveness of denial of service attacks.

Compatibility:

  When using our authentication for hidden services the implementation of
  IPo's needs to be extended. Therefore we use version information provided
  in router descriptors to be sure that we only send modified
  RELAY_ESTABLISH_INTRO cells to routers that can handle them. Clients and
  service providers will have to update their Tor installation if they
  want to be able to use the service.