Twitter's new Tor onion service

Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by sp332 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @02:27PM (#30618913)

Tor hidden servers have changed recently so this may be a bit out of date, but the client (at the Twitter user end) has to choose all the relays between itself and the endpoint. The server (Twitter) is also hidden here, so the client cannot make a path all the way to it, the way it could for a normal website. So Twitter publishes the address of a trusted relay instead. The client makes a path to the relay, and the relay forwards the request on to the hidden server.

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by wolverine876 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @02:58PM (#30619240)

Thank you. Why do some relays need to be public Internet hosts (if I understood correctly what I saw) instead of using all Tor hosts as relays? Sorry if the answer is somehow implicit in what you already posted.

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by sp332 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @03:29PM (#30619569)

https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/forwarding-tor-hidden-services...

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by wolverine876 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @04:14PM (#30620054)

Thanks for all your help and I understand if I've exhausted the efforts of free HN technical help!

I read the link and while I learned more about Tor, the article seems to describe how to secure Tor traffic that is forwarded to regular Internet hosts, for example if someone using a Tor client visited ycombinator.com. My question is, if you use a Tor client to visit twitterhpgjerufcvrmzerg2novpipy42rk3anvb5b7np4zggm4rwaqd.onion, why is part of the route through regular Internet hosts (afaict) and what are the implications of that? The article shows what I am describing in this screenshot; the blacked out parts next to "Portugal", "Germany", and "United States" are IP addresses:

https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/forwarding-tor-hidden-services...

(Also, my original post had it backward: the traffic goes through regular Internet hosts and then through Tor relays, not vice versa)

Again, maybe I am just missing the implications of what you are saying.

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by sp332 on Thursday March 10, 2022 @10:59AM (#30628380)

Yeah I was hoping someone would fill the in the details lol.

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by I_Byte on Thursday March 10, 2022 @01:37PM (#30630635)

I think I cleared up what was left unmentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30620496

I like your initial explanation sp332, I thought it was good so I elaborated on it.

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by LMYahooTFY on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @02:40PM (#30619041)

Isn't determining the full path in Tor for routing to it's .onion sort of defeating the purpose? Can the client request this level of specificity?

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by sp332 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @02:44PM (#30619072)

Only the trusted relay in the middle knows that half of the path. Sorry if that wasn't clear. And again, this was a hack on the original protocol that had some security issues. The implementation of hidden servers was recently updated and I don't know exactly what changed.

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by Bombthecat on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @03:36PM (#30619629)

But... Cant you noch the relay?

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by sp332 on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @06:18PM (#30621271)

Noch?

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Re:Twitter's new Tor onion service by Bombthecat on Thursday March 10, 2022 @10:53AM (#30628288)

Block, damn, autocorrect :)

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