$Id$ Tor Protocol Specification Roger Dingledine Nick Mathewson Note: This document aims to specify Tor as currently implemented. Future versions of Tor will implement improved protocols, and compatibility is not guaranteed. This specification is not a design document; most design criteria are not examined. For more information on why Tor acts as it does, see tor-design.pdf. TODO: (very soon) - REASON_CONNECTFAILED should include an IP. - Copy prose from tor-design to make everything more readable. when do we rotate which keys (tls, link, etc)? 0. Preliminaries 0.1. Notation and encoding PK -- a public key. SK -- a private key. K -- a key for a symmetric cypher. a|b -- concatenation of 'a' and 'b'. [A0 B1 C2] -- a three-byte sequence, containing the bytes with hexadecimal values A0, B1, and C2, in that order. All numeric values are encoded in network (big-endian) order. H(m) -- a cryptographic hash of m. 0.2. Security parameters Tor uses a stream cipher, a public-key cipher, the Diffie-Hellman protocol, and and a hash function. KEY_LEN -- the length of the stream cipher's key, in bytes. PK_ENC_LEN -- the length of a public-key encrypted message, in bytes. PK_PAD_LEN -- the number of bytes added in padding for public-key encryption, in bytes. (The largest number of bytes that can be encrypted in a single public-key operation is therefore PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN.) DH_LEN -- the number of bytes used to represent a member of the Diffie-Hellman group. DH_SEC_LEN -- the number of bytes used in a Diffie-Hellman private key (x). HASH_LEN -- the length of the hash function's output, in bytes. CELL_LEN -- The length of a Tor cell, in bytes. 0.3. Ciphers For a stream cipher, we use 128-bit AES in counter mode, with an IV of all 0 bytes. For a public-key cipher, we use RSA with 1024-bit keys and a fixed exponent of 65537. We use OAEP padding, with SHA-1 as its digest function. (For OAEP padding, see ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-1/pkcs-1v2-1.pdf) For Diffie-Hellman, we use a generator (g) of 2. For the modulus (p), we use the 1024-bit safe prime from rfc2409, (section 6.2) whose hex representation is: "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC90FDAA22168C234C4C6628B80DC1CD129024E08" "8A67CC74020BBEA63B139B22514A08798E3404DDEF9519B3CD3A431B" "302B0A6DF25F14374FE1356D6D51C245E485B576625E7EC6F44C42E9" "A637ED6B0BFF5CB6F406B7EDEE386BFB5A899FA5AE9F24117C4B1FE6" "49286651ECE65381FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF" As an optimization, implementations SHOULD choose DH private keys (x) of 320 bits. Implementations that do this MUST never use any DH key more than once. [May other implementations reuse their DH keys?? -RD] For a hash function, we use SHA-1. KEY_LEN=16. DH_LEN=128; DH_GROUP_LEN=40. PK_ENC_LEN=128; PK_PAD_LEN=42. HASH_LEN=20. When we refer to "the hash of a public key", we mean the SHA-1 hash of the DER encoding of an ASN.1 RSA public key (as specified in PKCS.1). All "random" values should be generated with a cryptographically strong random number generator, unless otherwise noted. The "hybrid encryption" of a byte sequence M with a public key PK is computed as follows: 1. If M is less than PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN, pad and encrypt M with PK. 2. Otherwise, generate a KEY_LEN byte random key K. Let M1 = the first PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN-KEY_LEN bytes of M, and let M2 = the rest of M. Pad and encrypt K|M1 with PK. Encrypt M2 with our stream cipher, using the key K. Concatenate these encrypted values. [XXX Note that this "hybrid encryption" approach does not prevent an attacker from adding or removing bytes to the end of M. It also allows attackers to modify the bytes not covered by the OAEP -- see Goldberg's PET2006 paper for details. We will add a MAC to this scheme one day. -RD] 0.4. Other parameter values CELL_LEN=512 1. System overview Tor is a distributed overlay network designed to anonymize low-latency TCP-based applications such as web browsing, secure shell, and instant messaging. Clients choose a path through the network and build a ``circuit'', in which each node (or ``onion router'' or ``OR'') in the path knows its predecessor and successor, but no other nodes in the circuit. Traffic flowing down the circuit is sent in fixed-size ``cells'', which are unwrapped by a symmetric key at each node (like the layers of an onion) and relayed downstream. 2. Connections There are two ways to connect to an onion router (OR). The first is as an onion proxy (OP), which allows the OP to authenticate the OR without authenticating itself. The second is as another OR, which allows mutual authentication. Tor uses TLS for link encryption. All implementations MUST support the TLS ciphersuite "TLS_EDH_RSA_WITH_DES_192_CBC3_SHA", and SHOULD support "TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA" if it is available. Implementations MAY support other ciphersuites, but MUST NOT support any suite without ephemeral keys, symmetric keys of at least KEY_LEN bits, and digests of at least HASH_LEN bits. An OP or OR always sends a two-certificate chain, consisting of a certificate using a short-term connection key and a second, self- signed certificate containing the OR's identity key. The commonName of the first certificate is the OR's nickname, and the commonName of the second certificate is the OR's nickname, followed by a space and the string "". All parties receiving certificates must confirm that the identity key is as expected. (When initiating a connection, the expected identity key is the one given in the directory; when creating a connection because of an EXTEND cell, the expected identity key is the one given in the cell.) If the key is not as expected, the party must close the connection. All parties SHOULD reject connections to or from ORs that have malformed or missing certificates. ORs MAY accept or reject connections from OPs with malformed or missing certificates. Once a TLS connection is established, the two sides send cells (specified below) to one another. Cells are sent serially. All cells are CELL_LEN bytes long. Cells may be sent embedded in TLS records of any size or divided across TLS records, but the framing of TLS records MUST NOT leak information about the type or contents of the cells. TLS connections are not permanent. An OP or an OR may close a connection to an OR if there are no circuits running over the connection, and an amount of time (KeepalivePeriod, defaults to 5 minutes) has passed. (As an exception, directory servers may try to stay connected to all of the ORs -- though this will be phased out for the Tor 0.1.2.x release.) 3. Cell Packet format The basic unit of communication for onion routers and onion proxies is a fixed-width "cell". Each cell contains the following fields: CircID [2 bytes] Command [1 byte] Payload (padded with 0 bytes) [CELL_LEN-3 bytes] [Total size: CELL_LEN bytes] The CircID field determines which circuit, if any, the cell is associated with. The 'Command' field holds one of the following values: 0 -- PADDING (Padding) (See Sec 6.2) 1 -- CREATE (Create a circuit) (See Sec 4.1) 2 -- CREATED (Acknowledge create) (See Sec 4.1) 3 -- RELAY (End-to-end data) (See Sec 4.5 and 5) 4 -- DESTROY (Stop using a circuit) (See Sec 4.4) 5 -- CREATE_FAST (Create a circuit, no PK) (See Sec 4.1) 6 -- CREATED_FAST (Circuit created, no PK) (See Sec 4.1) 7 -- HELLO (Introduce the OR) (See Sec 7.1) The interpretation of 'Payload' depends on the type of the cell. PADDING: Payload is unused. CREATE: Payload contains the handshake challenge. CREATED: Payload contains the handshake response. RELAY: Payload contains the relay header and relay body. DESTROY: Payload contains a reason for closing the circuit. (see 4.4) Upon receiving any other value for the command field, an OR must drop the cell. The payload is padded with 0 bytes. PADDING cells are currently used to implement connection keepalive. If there is no other traffic, ORs and OPs send one another a PADDING cell every few minutes. CREATE, CREATED, and DESTROY cells are used to manage circuits; see section 4 below. RELAY cells are used to send commands and data along a circuit; see section 5 below. HELLO cells are used to introduce parameters and characteristics of Tor clients and servers when connections are established. 4. Circuit management 4.1. CREATE and CREATED cells Users set up circuits incrementally, one hop at a time. To create a new circuit, OPs send a CREATE cell to the first node, with the first half of the DH handshake; that node responds with a CREATED cell with the second half of the DH handshake plus the first 20 bytes of derivative key data (see section 4.2). To extend a circuit past the first hop, the OP sends an EXTEND relay cell (see section 5) which instructs the last node in the circuit to send a CREATE cell to extend the circuit. The payload for a CREATE cell is an 'onion skin', which consists of the first step of the DH handshake data (also known as g^x). This value is hybrid-encrypted (see 0.3) to Bob's public key, giving an onion-skin of: PK-encrypted: Padding padding [PK_PAD_LEN bytes] Symmetric key [KEY_LEN bytes] First part of g^x [PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN-KEY_LEN bytes] Symmetrically encrypted: Second part of g^x [DH_LEN-(PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN-KEY_LEN) bytes] The relay payload for an EXTEND relay cell consists of: Address [4 bytes] Port [2 bytes] Onion skin [DH_LEN+KEY_LEN+PK_PAD_LEN bytes] Identity fingerprint [HASH_LEN bytes] The port and address field denote the IPV4 address and port of the next onion router in the circuit; the public key hash is the hash of the PKCS#1 ASN1 encoding of the next onion router's identity (signing) key. (See 0.3 above.) (Including this hash allows the extending OR verify that it is indeed connected to the correct target OR, and prevents certain man-in-the-middle attacks.) The payload for a CREATED cell, or the relay payload for an EXTENDED cell, contains: DH data (g^y) [DH_LEN bytes] Derivative key data (KH) [HASH_LEN bytes] The CircID for a CREATE cell is an arbitrarily chosen 2-byte integer, selected by the node (OP or OR) that sends the CREATE cell. To prevent CircID collisions, when one OR sends a CREATE cell to another, it chooses from only one half of the possible values based on the ORs' public identity keys: if the sending OR has a lower key, it chooses a CircID with an MSB of 0; otherwise, it chooses a CircID with an MSB of 1. Public keys are compared numerically by modulus. As usual with DH, x and y MUST be generated randomly. 4.1.1. CREATE_FAST/CREATED_FAST cells When initializing the first hop of a circuit, the OP has already established the OR's identity and negotiated a secret key using TLS. Because of this, it is not always necessary for the OP to perform the public key operations to create a circuit. In this case, the OP MAY send a CREATE_FAST cell instead of a CREATE cell for the first hop only. The OR responds with a CREATED_FAST cell, and the circuit is created. A CREATE_FAST cell contains: Key material (X) [HASH_LEN bytes] A CREATED_FAST cell contains: Key material (Y) [HASH_LEN bytes] Derivative key data [HASH_LEN bytes] (See 4.2 below) The values of X and Y must be generated randomly. [Versions of Tor before 0.1.0.6-rc did not support these cell types; clients should not send CREATE_FAST cells to older Tor servers.] 4.2. Setting circuit keys Once the handshake between the OP and an OR is completed, both can now calculate g^xy with ordinary DH. Before computing g^xy, both client and server MUST verify that the received g^x or g^y value is not degenerate; that is, it must be strictly greater than 1 and strictly less than p-1 where p is the DH modulus. Implementations MUST NOT complete a handshake with degenerate keys. Implementations MAY discard other "weak" g^x values. (Discarding degenerate keys is critical for security; if bad keys are not discarded, an attacker can substitute the server's CREATED cell's g^y with 0 or 1, thus creating a known g^xy and impersonating the server.) (The mainline Tor implementation, in the 0.1.1.x-alpha series, discarded all g^x values less than 2^24, greater than p-2^24, or having more than 1024-16 identical bits. This served no useful purpose, and we stopped.) If CREATE or EXTEND is used to extend a circuit, the client and server base their key material on K0=g^xy, represented as a big-endian unsigned integer. If CREATE_FAST is used, the client and server base their key material on K0=X|Y. From the base key material K0, they compute KEY_LEN*2+HASH_LEN*3 bytes of derivative key data as K = H(K0 | [00]) | H(K0 | [01]) | H(K0 | [02]) | ... The first HASH_LEN bytes of K form KH; the next HASH_LEN form the forward digest Df; the next HASH_LEN 41-60 form the backward digest Db; the next KEY_LEN 61-76 form Kf, and the final KEY_LEN form Kb. Excess bytes from K are discarded. KH is used in the handshake response to demonstrate knowledge of the computed shared key. Df is used to seed the integrity-checking hash for the stream of data going from the OP to the OR, and Db seeds the integrity-checking hash for the data stream from the OR to the OP. Kf is used to encrypt the stream of data going from the OP to the OR, and Kb is used to encrypt the stream of data going from the OR to the OP. 4.3. Creating circuits When creating a circuit through the network, the circuit creator (OP) performs the following steps: 1. Choose an onion router as an exit node (R_N), such that the onion router's exit policy includes at least one pending stream that needs a circuit (if there are any). 2. Choose a chain of (N-1) onion routers (R_1...R_N-1) to constitute the path, such that no router appears in the path twice. 3. If not already connected to the first router in the chain, open a new connection to that router. 4. Choose a circID not already in use on the connection with the first router in the chain; send a CREATE cell along the connection, to be received by the first onion router. 5. Wait until a CREATED cell is received; finish the handshake and extract the forward key Kf_1 and the backward key Kb_1. 6. For each subsequent onion router R (R_2 through R_N), extend the circuit to R. To extend the circuit by a single onion router R_M, the OP performs these steps: 1. Create an onion skin, encrypted to R_M's public key. 2. Send the onion skin in a relay EXTEND cell along the circuit (see section 5). 3. When a relay EXTENDED cell is received, verify KH, and calculate the shared keys. The circuit is now extended. When an onion router receives an EXTEND relay cell, it sends a CREATE cell to the next onion router, with the enclosed onion skin as its payload. The initiating onion router chooses some circID not yet used on the connection between the two onion routers. (But see section 4.1. above, concerning choosing circIDs based on lexicographic order of nicknames.) When an onion router receives a CREATE cell, if it already has a circuit on the given connection with the given circID, it drops the cell. Otherwise, after receiving the CREATE cell, it completes the DH handshake, and replies with a CREATED cell. Upon receiving a CREATED cell, an onion router packs it payload into an EXTENDED relay cell (see section 5), and sends that cell up the circuit. Upon receiving the EXTENDED relay cell, the OP can retrieve g^y. (As an optimization, OR implementations may delay processing onions until a break in traffic allows time to do so without harming network latency too greatly.) 4.4. Tearing down circuits Circuits are torn down when an unrecoverable error occurs along the circuit, or when all streams on a circuit are closed and the circuit's intended lifetime is over. Circuits may be torn down either completely or hop-by-hop. To tear down a circuit completely, an OR or OP sends a DESTROY cell to the adjacent nodes on that circuit, using the appropriate direction's circID. Upon receiving an outgoing DESTROY cell, an OR frees resources associated with the corresponding circuit. If it's not the end of the circuit, it sends a DESTROY cell for that circuit to the next OR in the circuit. If the node is the end of the circuit, then it tears down any associated edge connections (see section 5.1). After a DESTROY cell has been processed, an OR ignores all data or destroy cells for the corresponding circuit. To tear down part of a circuit, the OP may send a RELAY_TRUNCATE cell signaling a given OR (Stream ID zero). That OR sends a DESTROY cell to the next node in the circuit, and replies to the OP with a RELAY_TRUNCATED cell. When an unrecoverable error occurs along one connection in a circuit, the nodes on either side of the connection should, if they are able, act as follows: the node closer to the OP should send a RELAY_TRUNCATED cell towards the OP; the node farther from the OP should send a DESTROY cell down the circuit. The payload of a RELAY_TRUNCATED or DESTROY cell contains a single octet, describing why the circuit is being closed or truncated. When sending a TRUNCATED or DESTROY cell because of another TRUNCATED or DESTROY cell, the error code should be propagated. The origin of a circuit always sets this error code to 0, to avoid leaking its version. The error codes are: 0 -- NONE (No reason given.) 1 -- PROTOCOL (Tor protocol violation.) 2 -- INTERNAL (Internal error.) 3 -- REQUESTED (A client sent a TRUNCATE command.) 4 -- HIBERNATING (Not currently operating; trying to save bandwidth.) 5 -- RESOURCELIMIT (Out of memory, sockets, or circuit IDs.) 6 -- CONNECTFAILED (Unable to reach server.) 7 -- OR_IDENTITY (Connected to server, but its OR identity was not as expected.) 8 -- OR_CONN_CLOSED (The OR connection that was carrying this circuit died.) [Versions of Tor prior to 0.1.0.11 didn't send reasons; implementations MUST accept empty TRUNCATED and DESTROY cells.] 4.5. Routing relay cells When an OR receives a RELAY cell, it checks the cell's circID and determines whether it has a corresponding circuit along that connection. If not, the OR drops the RELAY cell. Otherwise, if the OR is not at the OP edge of the circuit (that is, either an 'exit node' or a non-edge node), it de/encrypts the payload with the stream cipher, as follows: 'Forward' relay cell (same direction as CREATE): Use Kf as key; decrypt. 'Back' relay cell (opposite direction from CREATE): Use Kb as key; encrypt. Note that in counter mode, decrypt and encrypt are the same operation. The OR then decides whether it recognizes the relay cell, by inspecting the payload as described in section 5.1 below. If the OR recognizes the cell, it processes the contents of the relay cell. Otherwise, it passes the decrypted relay cell along the circuit if the circuit continues. If the OR at the end of the circuit encounters an unrecognized relay cell, an error has occurred: the OR sends a DESTROY cell to tear down the circuit. When a relay cell arrives at an OP, the OP decrypts the payload with the stream cipher as follows: OP receives data cell: For I=N...1, Decrypt with Kb_I. If the payload is recognized (see section 5.1), then stop and process the payload. For more information, see section 5 below. 5. Application connections and stream management 5.1. Relay cells Within a circuit, the OP and the exit node use the contents of RELAY packets to tunnel end-to-end commands and TCP connections ("Streams") across circuits. End-to-end commands can be initiated by either edge; streams are initiated by the OP. The payload of each unencrypted RELAY cell consists of: Relay command [1 byte] 'Recognized' [2 bytes] StreamID [2 bytes] Digest [4 bytes] Length [2 bytes] Data [CELL_LEN-14 bytes] The relay commands are: 1 -- RELAY_BEGIN [forward] 2 -- RELAY_DATA [forward or backward] 3 -- RELAY_END [forward or backward] 4 -- RELAY_CONNECTED [backward] 5 -- RELAY_SENDME [forward or backward] 6 -- RELAY_EXTEND [forward] 7 -- RELAY_EXTENDED [backward] 8 -- RELAY_TRUNCATE [forward] 9 -- RELAY_TRUNCATED [backward] 10 -- RELAY_DROP [forward or backward] 11 -- RELAY_RESOLVE [forward] 12 -- RELAY_RESOLVED [backward] Commands labelled as "forward" must only be sent by the originator of the circuit. Commands labelled as "backward" must only be sent by other nodes in the circuit back to the originator. Commands marked as either can be sent either by the originator or other nodes. The 'recognized' field in any unencrypted relay payload is always set to zero; the 'digest' field is computed as the first four bytes of the running digest of all the bytes that have been destined for this hop of the circuit or originated from this hop of the circuit, seeded from Df or Db respectively (obtained in section 4.2 above), and including this RELAY cell's entire payload (taken with the digest field set to zero). When the 'recognized' field of a RELAY cell is zero, and the digest is correct, the cell is considered "recognized" for the purposes of decryption (see section 4.5 above). (The digest does not include any bytes from relay cells that do not start or end at this hop of the circuit. That is, it does not include forwarded data. Therefore if 'recognized' is zero but the digest does not match, the running digest at that node should not be updated, and the cell should be forwarded on.) All RELAY cells pertaining to the same tunneled stream have the same stream ID. StreamIDs are chosen arbitrarily by the OP. RELAY cells that affect the entire circuit rather than a particular stream use a StreamID of zero. The 'Length' field of a relay cell contains the number of bytes in the relay payload which contain real payload data. The remainder of the payload is padded with NUL bytes. If the RELAY cell is recognized but the relay command is not understood, the cell must be dropped and ignored. Its contents still count with respect to the digests, though. [Before 0.1.1.10, Tor closed circuits when it received an unknown relay command. Perhaps this will be more forward-compatible. -RD] 5.2. Opening streams and transferring data To open a new anonymized TCP connection, the OP chooses an open circuit to an exit that may be able to connect to the destination address, selects an arbitrary StreamID not yet used on that circuit, and constructs a RELAY_BEGIN cell with a payload encoding the address and port of the destination host. The payload format is: ADDRESS | ':' | PORT | [00] where ADDRESS can be a DNS hostname, or an IPv4 address in dotted-quad format, or an IPv6 address surrounded by square brackets; and where PORT is encoded in decimal. [What is the [00] for? -NM] [It's so the payload is easy to parse out with string funcs -RD] Upon receiving this cell, the exit node resolves the address as necessary, and opens a new TCP connection to the target port. If the address cannot be resolved, or a connection can't be established, the exit node replies with a RELAY_END cell. (See 5.4 below.) Otherwise, the exit node replies with a RELAY_CONNECTED cell, whose payload is in one of the following formats: The IPv4 address to which the connection was made [4 octets] A number of seconds (TTL) for which the address may be cached [4 octets] or Four zero-valued octets [4 octets] An address type (6) [1 octet] The IPv6 address to which the connection was made [16 octets] A number of seconds (TTL) for which the address may be cached [4 octets] [XXXX Versions of Tor before 0.1.1.6 ignore and do not generate the TTL field. No version of Tor currently generates the IPv6 format. Tor servers before 0.1.2.0 set the TTL field to a fixed value. Later versions set the TTL to the last value seen from a DNS server, and expire their own cached entries after a fixed interval. This prevents certain attacks.] The OP waits for a RELAY_CONNECTED cell before sending any data. Once a connection has been established, the OP and exit node package stream data in RELAY_DATA cells, and upon receiving such cells, echo their contents to the corresponding TCP stream. RELAY_DATA cells sent to unrecognized streams are dropped. Relay RELAY_DROP cells are long-range dummies; upon receiving such a cell, the OR or OP must drop it. 5.3. Closing streams When an anonymized TCP connection is closed, or an edge node encounters error on any stream, it sends a 'RELAY_END' cell along the circuit (if possible) and closes the TCP connection immediately. If an edge node receives a 'RELAY_END' cell for any stream, it closes the TCP connection completely, and sends nothing more along the circuit for that stream. The payload of a RELAY_END cell begins with a single 'reason' byte to describe why the stream is closing, plus optional data (depending on the reason.) The values are: 1 -- REASON_MISC (catch-all for unlisted reasons) 2 -- REASON_RESOLVEFAILED (couldn't look up hostname) 3 -- REASON_CONNECTREFUSED (remote host refused connection) [*] 4 -- REASON_EXITPOLICY (OR refuses to connect to host or port) 5 -- REASON_DESTROY (Circuit is being destroyed) 6 -- REASON_DONE (Anonymized TCP connection was closed) 7 -- REASON_TIMEOUT (Connection timed out, or OR timed out while connecting) 8 -- (unallocated) [**] 9 -- REASON_HIBERNATING (OR is temporarily hibernating) 10 -- REASON_INTERNAL (Internal error at the OR) 11 -- REASON_RESOURCELIMIT (OR has no resources to fulfill request) 12 -- REASON_CONNRESET (Connection was unexpectedly reset) 13 -- REASON_TORPROTOCOL (Sent when closing connection because of Tor protocol violations.) (With REASON_EXITPOLICY, the 4-byte IPv4 address or 16-byte IPv6 address forms the optional data; no other reason currently has extra data. As of 0.1.1.6, the body also contains a 4-byte TTL.) OPs and ORs MUST accept reasons not on the above list, since future versions of Tor may provide more fine-grained reasons. [*] Older versions of Tor also send this reason when connections are reset. [**] Due to a bug in versions of Tor through 0095, error reason 8 must remain allocated until that version is obsolete. --- [The rest of this section describes unimplemented functionality.] Because TCP connections can be half-open, we follow an equivalent to TCP's FIN/FIN-ACK/ACK protocol to close streams. An exit connection can have a TCP stream in one of three states: 'OPEN', 'DONE_PACKAGING', and 'DONE_DELIVERING'. For the purposes of modeling transitions, we treat 'CLOSED' as a fourth state, although connections in this state are not, in fact, tracked by the onion router. A stream begins in the 'OPEN' state. Upon receiving a 'FIN' from the corresponding TCP connection, the edge node sends a 'RELAY_FIN' cell along the circuit and changes its state to 'DONE_PACKAGING'. Upon receiving a 'RELAY_FIN' cell, an edge node sends a 'FIN' to the corresponding TCP connection (e.g., by calling shutdown(SHUT_WR)) and changing its state to 'DONE_DELIVERING'. When a stream in already in 'DONE_DELIVERING' receives a 'FIN', it also sends a 'RELAY_FIN' along the circuit, and changes its state to 'CLOSED'. When a stream already in 'DONE_PACKAGING' receives a 'RELAY_FIN' cell, it sends a 'FIN' and changes its state to 'CLOSED'. If an edge node encounters an error on any stream, it sends a 'RELAY_END' cell (if possible) and closes the stream immediately. 5.4. Remote hostname lookup To find the address associated with a hostname, the OP sends a RELAY_RESOLVE cell containing the hostname to be resolved. (For a reverse lookup, the OP sends a RELAY_RESOLVE cell containing an in-addr.arpa address.) The OR replies with a RELAY_RESOLVED cell containing a status byte, and any number of answers. Each answer is of the form: Type (1 octet) Length (1 octet) Value (variable-width) TTL (4 octets) "Length" is the length of the Value field. "Type" is one of: 0x00 -- Hostname 0x04 -- IPv4 address 0x06 -- IPv6 address 0xF0 -- Error, transient 0xF1 -- Error, nontransient If any answer has a type of 'Error', then no other answer may be given. The RELAY_RESOLVE cell must use a nonzero, distinct streamID; the corresponding RELAY_RESOLVED cell must use the same streamID. No stream is actually created by the OR when resolving the name. 6. Flow control 6.1. Link throttling Each node should do appropriate bandwidth throttling to keep its user happy. Communicants rely on TCP's default flow control to push back when they stop reading. 6.2. Link padding Currently nodes are not required to do any sort of link padding or dummy traffic. Because strong attacks exist even with link padding, and because link padding greatly increases the bandwidth requirements for running a node, we plan to leave out link padding until this tradeoff is better understood. 6.3. Circuit-level flow control To control a circuit's bandwidth usage, each OR keeps track of two 'windows', consisting of how many RELAY_DATA cells it is allowed to package for transmission, and how many RELAY_DATA cells it is willing to deliver to streams outside the network. Each 'window' value is initially set to 1000 data cells in each direction (cells that are not data cells do not affect the window). When an OR is willing to deliver more cells, it sends a RELAY_SENDME cell towards the OP, with Stream ID zero. When an OR receives a RELAY_SENDME cell with stream ID zero, it increments its packaging window. Each of these cells increments the corresponding window by 100. The OP behaves identically, except that it must track a packaging window and a delivery window for every OR in the circuit. An OR or OP sends cells to increment its delivery window when the corresponding window value falls under some threshold (900). If a packaging window reaches 0, the OR or OP stops reading from TCP connections for all streams on the corresponding circuit, and sends no more RELAY_DATA cells until receiving a RELAY_SENDME cell. [this stuff is badly worded; copy in the tor-design section -RD] 6.4. Stream-level flow control Edge nodes use RELAY_SENDME cells to implement end-to-end flow control for individual connections across circuits. Similarly to circuit-level flow control, edge nodes begin with a window of cells (500) per stream, and increment the window by a fixed value (50) upon receiving a RELAY_SENDME cell. Edge nodes initiate RELAY_SENDME cells when both a) the window is <= 450, and b) there are less than ten cell payloads remaining to be flushed at that edge. 7. Other cell types 7.1. HELLO cells When a Tor connection is established, both sides must send a HELLO cell before sending any other cells. Version [1 byte] Timestamp [4 bytes] Number of addresses [1 byte] Addresses [variable] others? Version is the "link version", and dictates what types and formats of cells can be sent/received. It should be 1. A Tor connection is considered to be using version 0 if the first cell we receive is not a HELLO cell. Timestamp is the OR's current Unix time (GMT). Each address contains Type/Length/Value as used in Section 5.4. This section lists all addresses that the OR has published and is listening to now -- we include them to block a man-in-the-middle attack on TLS that lets an attacker bounce traffic through his own computers to enable timing and packet-counting attacks. [Do we want to provide just one address? Do we want to be more general by accepting netmasks or something? -RD] If we receive a HELLO cell with a version we do not recognize, we drop it. If we receive a HELLO cell with a version that is older than the version we sent in our HELLO cell, we must resend a new HELLO cell using that version. 8. Directories and routers 8.1. Extensible information format Router descriptors and directories both obey the following lightweight extensible information format. The highest level object is a Document, which consists of one or more Items. Every Item begins with a KeywordLine, followed by one or more Objects. A KeywordLine begins with a Keyword, optionally followed by whitespace and more non-newline characters, and ends with a newline. A Keyword is a sequence of one or more characters in the set [A-Za-z0-9-]. An Object is a block of encoded data in pseudo-Open-PGP-style armor. (cf. RFC 2440) More formally: Document ::= (Item | NL)+ Item ::= KeywordLine Object* KeywordLine ::= Keyword NL | Keyword WS ArgumentsChar+ NL Keyword = KeywordChar+ KeywordChar ::= 'A' ... 'Z' | 'a' ... 'z' | '0' ... '9' | '-' ArgumentChar ::= any printing ASCII character except NL. WS = (SP | TAB)+ Object ::= BeginLine Base-64-encoded-data EndLine BeginLine ::= "-----BEGIN " Keyword "-----" NL EndLine ::= "-----END " Keyword "-----" NL The BeginLine and EndLine of an Object must use the same keyword. When interpreting a Document, software MUST reject any document containing a KeywordLine that starts with a keyword it doesn't recognize. The "opt" keyword is reserved for non-critical future extensions. All implementations MUST ignore any item of the form "opt keyword ....." when they would not recognize "keyword ....."; and MUST treat "opt keyword ....." as synonymous with "keyword ......" when keyword is recognized. 8.2. Router descriptor format. Every router descriptor MUST start with a "router" Item; MUST end with a "router-signature" Item and an extra NL; and MUST contain exactly one instance of each of the following Items: "published" "onion-key" "link-key" "signing-key" "bandwidth". Additionally, a router descriptor MAY contain any number of "accept", "reject", "fingerprint", "uptime", and "opt" Items. Other than "router" and "router-signature", the items may appear in any order. The items' formats are as follows: "router" nickname address ORPort SocksPort DirPort Indicates the beginning of a router descriptor. "address" must be an IPv4 address in dotted-quad format. The last three numbers indicate the TCP ports at which this OR exposes functionality. ORPort is a port at which this OR accepts TLS connections for the main OR protocol; SocksPort is deprecated and should always be 0; and DirPort is the port at which this OR accepts directory-related HTTP connections. If any port is not supported, the value 0 is given instead of a port number. "bandwidth" bandwidth-avg bandwidth-burst bandwidth-observed Estimated bandwidth for this router, in bytes per second. The "average" bandwidth is the volume per second that the OR is willing to sustain over long periods; the "burst" bandwidth is the volume that the OR is willing to sustain in very short intervals. The "observed" value is an estimate of the capacity this server can handle. The server remembers the max bandwidth sustained output over any ten second period in the past day, and another sustained input. The "observed" value is the lesser of these two numbers. "platform" string A human-readable string describing the system on which this OR is running. This MAY include the operating system, and SHOULD include the name and version of the software implementing the Tor protocol. "published" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS The time, in GMT, when this descriptor was generated. "fingerprint" A fingerprint (a HASH_LEN-byte of asn1 encoded public key, encoded in hex, with a single space after every 4 characters) for this router's identity key. [We didn't start parsing this line until Tor 0.1.0.6-rc; it should be marked with "opt" until earlier versions of Tor are obsolete.] "hibernating" 0|1 If the value is 1, then the Tor server was hibernating when the descriptor was published, and shouldn't be used to build circuits. [We didn't start parsing this line until Tor 0.1.0.6-rc; it should be marked with "opt" until earlier versions of Tor are obsolete.] "uptime" The number of seconds that this OR process has been running. "onion-key" NL a public key in PEM format This key is used to encrypt EXTEND cells for this OR. The key MUST be accepted for at least XXXX hours after any new key is published in a subsequent descriptor. "signing-key" NL a public key in PEM format The OR's long-term identity key. "accept" exitpattern "reject" exitpattern These lines, in order, describe the rules that an OR follows when deciding whether to allow a new stream to a given address. The 'exitpattern' syntax is described below. "router-signature" NL Signature NL The "SIGNATURE" object contains a signature of the PKCS1-padded hash of the entire router descriptor, taken from the beginning of the "router" line, through the newline after the "router-signature" line. The router descriptor is invalid unless the signature is performed with the router's identity key. "contact" info NL Describes a way to contact the server's administrator, preferably including an email address and a PGP key fingerprint. "family" names NL 'Names' is a whitespace-separated list of server nicknames. If two ORs list one another in their "family" entries, then OPs should treat them as a single OR for the purpose of path selection. For example, if node A's descriptor contains "family B", and node B's descriptor contains "family A", then node A and node B should never be used on the same circuit. "read-history" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (NSEC s) NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM... NL "write-history" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (NSEC s) NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM... NL Declare how much bandwidth the OR has used recently. Usage is divided into intervals of NSEC seconds. The YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS field defines the end of the most recent interval. The numbers are the number of bytes used in the most recent intervals, ordered from oldest to newest. [We didn't start parsing these lines until Tor 0.1.0.6-rc; they should be marked with "opt" until earlier versions of Tor are obsolete.] nickname ::= between 1 and 19 alphanumeric characters, case-insensitive. exitpattern ::= addrspec ":" portspec portspec ::= "*" | port | port "-" port port ::= an integer between 1 and 65535, inclusive. addrspec ::= "*" | ip4spec | ip6spec ipv4spec ::= ip4 | ip4 "/" num_ip4_bits | ip4 "/" ip4mask ip4 ::= an IPv4 address in dotted-quad format ip4mask ::= an IPv4 mask in dotted-quad format num_ip4_bits ::= an integer between 0 and 32 ip6spec ::= ip6 | ip6 "/" num_ip6_bits ip6 ::= an IPv6 address, surrounded by square brackets. num_ip6_bits ::= an integer between 0 and 128 Ports are required; if they are not included in the router line, they must appear in the "ports" lines. 8.3. Directory format A Directory begins with a "signed-directory" item, followed by one each of the following, in any order: "recommended-software", "published", "router-status", "dir-signing-key". It may include any number of "opt" items. After these items, a directory includes any number of router descriptors, and a single "directory-signature" item. "signed-directory" Indicates the start of a directory. "published" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS The time at which this directory was generated and signed, in GMT. "dir-signing-key" The key used to sign this directory; see "signing-key" for format. "recommended-software" comma-separated-version-list A list of which versions of which implementations are currently believed to be secure and compatible with the network. "running-routers" whitespace-separated-list A description of which routers are currently believed to be up or down. Every entry consists of an optional "!", followed by either an OR's nickname, or "$" followed by a hexadecimal encoding of the hash of an OR's identity key. If the "!" is included, the router is believed not to be running; otherwise, it is believed to be running. If a router's nickname is given, exactly one router of that nickname will appear in the directory, and that router is "approved" by the directory server. If a hashed identity key is given, that OR is not "approved". [XXXX The 'running-routers' line is only provided for backward compatibility. New code should parse 'router-status' instead.] "router-status" whitespace-separated-list A description of which routers are currently believed to be up or down, and which are verified or unverified. Contains one entry for every router that the directory server knows. Each entry is of the format: !name=$digest [Verified router, currently not live.] name=$digest [Verified router, currently live.] !$digest [Unverified router, currently not live.] or $digest [Unverified router, currently live.] (where 'name' is the router's nickname and 'digest' is a hexadecimal encoding of the hash of the routers' identity key). When parsing this line, clients should only mark a router as 'verified' if its nickname AND digest match the one provided. "directory-signature" nickname-of-dirserver NL Signature The signature is computed by computing the digest of the directory, from the characters "signed-directory", through the newline after "directory-signature". This digest is then padded with PKCS.1, and signed with the directory server's signing key. If software encounters an unrecognized keyword in a single router descriptor, it MUST reject only that router descriptor, and continue using the others. Because this mechanism is used to add 'critical' extensions to future versions of the router descriptor format, implementation should treat it as a normal occurrence and not, for example, report it to the user as an error. [Versions of Tor prior to 0.1.1 did this.] If software encounters an unrecognized keyword in the directory header, it SHOULD reject the entire directory. 8.4. Network-status descriptor A "network-status" (a.k.a "running-routers") document is a truncated directory that contains only the current status of a list of nodes, not their actual descriptors. It contains exactly one of each of the following entries. "network-status" Must appear first. "published" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (see 8.3 above) "router-status" list (see 8.3 above) "directory-signature" NL signature (see 8.3 above) 8.5. Behavior of a directory server lists nodes that are connected currently speaks HTTP on a socket, spits out directory on request Directory servers listen on a certain port (the DirPort), and speak a limited version of HTTP 1.0. Clients send either GET or POST commands. The basic interactions are: "%s %s HTTP/1.0\r\nContent-Length: %lu\r\nHost: %s\r\n\r\n", command, url, content-length, host. Get "/tor/" to fetch a full directory. Get "/tor/dir.z" to fetch a compressed full directory. Get "/tor/running-routers" to fetch a network-status descriptor. Post "/tor/" to post a server descriptor, with the body of the request containing the descriptor. "host" is used to specify the address:port of the dirserver, so the request can survive going through HTTP proxies. A.1. Differences between spec and implementation - The current specification requires all ORs to have IPv4 addresses, but allows servers to exit and resolve to IPv6 addresses, and to declare IPv6 addresses in their exit policies. The current codebase has no IPv6 support at all. B. Things that should change in a later version of the Tor protocol B.1. ... but which will require backward-incompatible change - Circuit IDs should be longer. - IPv6 everywhere. - Maybe, keys should be longer. - Maybe, key-length should be adjustable. How to do this without making anonymity suck? - Drop backward compatibility. - We should use a 128-bit subgroup of our DH prime. - Handshake should use HMAC. - Multiple cell lengths. - Ability to split circuits across paths (If this is useful.) - SENDME windows should be dynamic. - Directory - Stop ever mentioning socks ports B.1. ... and that will require no changes - Mention multiple addr/port combos - Advertised outbound IP? - Migrate streams across circuits. B.2. ... and that we have no idea how to do. - UDP (as transport) - UDP (as content) - Use a better AES mode that has built-in integrity checking, doesn't grow with the number of hops, is not patented, and is implemented and maintained by smart people.