<story><title>Making Connections to Facebook More Secure</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/making-connections-to-facebook-more-secure/1526085754298237</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mike_hearn</author><text>Nothing, and it&amp;#x27;s interesting that they have enough computational power to do that for a relatively trivial project.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, whilst I applaud Facebook going above and beyond here, this doesn&amp;#x27;t set a good precedent.&lt;p&gt;Firstly, Onion service are very slow. There is no need to pay this cost for a service whose ownership is not actually hidden. If the Tor project made it easier to reliably identify traffic from Tor exit nodes, Facebook could apply whatever rules they wanted to Tor traffic without needing to slow things down for everyone.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, by doing this, there&amp;#x27;s now a risk that other firms who want to be on the cutting edge of privacy will try to copycat this approach, even though it makes no sense and is very complex and expensive to set up. Worse, users might think it&amp;#x27;s some kind of &amp;quot;gold standard&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, it doesn&amp;#x27;t actually solve any of the reasons why Tor traffic is routinely discriminated against and harassed: Tor is effectively a &amp;quot;bulletproof ISP&amp;quot; that shields a lot of abuse and hacking. Merely making a Tor hidden service specifically for Facebook doesn&amp;#x27;t solve that, at all.</text></item><item><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>It concerns me that they were able to brute force a key for facebookcorewwwi.onion. If they can do that, what&amp;#x27;s to stop somebody else coming along and brute forcing a key for the same hostname.&lt;p&gt;Looks like Tor hidden services are now broken to me...&lt;p&gt;[edit] What&amp;#x27;s to stop Facebook from brute forcing a key for any of the existing hidden services?&lt;p&gt;[edit2] If Facebook can brute force keys like this, so can the NSA and GCHQ. Tor hidden services are officially broken.&lt;p&gt;[edit3] A colleague of mine suggested that this might be simply Facebooks way of making it public knowledge that Tor hidden services can no longer be relied upon.&lt;p&gt;[edit4] Facebook are saying (on the Tor Talk list) that they generated a load of keys starting &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; and then just picked the one which looked most memorable, and were extremely lucky to get such a good one:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archives.seul.org/tor/talk/Oct-2014/msg00433.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archives.seul.org&amp;#x2F;tor&amp;#x2F;talk&amp;#x2F;Oct-2014&amp;#x2F;msg00433.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bostik</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Worse, users might think it&amp;#x27;s some kind of &amp;quot;gold standard&amp;quot;.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That may be the worst unexpected consequence. Once onion services become more mainstream, I fear FB&amp;#x27;s example - no matter how well intentioned - will turn into an engineering nightmare. After all, after one of the best known online brands does something clever, you can expect copycats to follow.&lt;p&gt;First, we&amp;#x27;ll get clueless PHB types demanding long vanity names.&lt;p&gt;Second, some services will happen upon neat onion addresses and ride the wave. Their very existence will act as a goal post for the others.&lt;p&gt;Third, a vocal segment of users becomes accustomed to seeing &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; vanity names. After all, such name means that the entity behind the name has enough resources to actually get a proper vanity name.&lt;p&gt;Amidst all that, somewhere between stages #2 and #3, we will see (horribly misguided) vanity onion service name markets. A bit like domain name squatting from the late 90&amp;#x27;s, but with far worse consequences: at least with domain names the only thing transferred was the control over the DNS entry. Because onion service names are directly mapped to the private keys, selling a $VANITY.onion address is the same as selling &lt;i&gt;a copy of the private key.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Caveat emptor, indeed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Making Connections to Facebook More Secure</title><url>https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/making-connections-to-facebook-more-secure/1526085754298237</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mike_hearn</author><text>Nothing, and it&amp;#x27;s interesting that they have enough computational power to do that for a relatively trivial project.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, whilst I applaud Facebook going above and beyond here, this doesn&amp;#x27;t set a good precedent.&lt;p&gt;Firstly, Onion service are very slow. There is no need to pay this cost for a service whose ownership is not actually hidden. If the Tor project made it easier to reliably identify traffic from Tor exit nodes, Facebook could apply whatever rules they wanted to Tor traffic without needing to slow things down for everyone.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, by doing this, there&amp;#x27;s now a risk that other firms who want to be on the cutting edge of privacy will try to copycat this approach, even though it makes no sense and is very complex and expensive to set up. Worse, users might think it&amp;#x27;s some kind of &amp;quot;gold standard&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, it doesn&amp;#x27;t actually solve any of the reasons why Tor traffic is routinely discriminated against and harassed: Tor is effectively a &amp;quot;bulletproof ISP&amp;quot; that shields a lot of abuse and hacking. Merely making a Tor hidden service specifically for Facebook doesn&amp;#x27;t solve that, at all.</text></item><item><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>It concerns me that they were able to brute force a key for facebookcorewwwi.onion. If they can do that, what&amp;#x27;s to stop somebody else coming along and brute forcing a key for the same hostname.&lt;p&gt;Looks like Tor hidden services are now broken to me...&lt;p&gt;[edit] What&amp;#x27;s to stop Facebook from brute forcing a key for any of the existing hidden services?&lt;p&gt;[edit2] If Facebook can brute force keys like this, so can the NSA and GCHQ. Tor hidden services are officially broken.&lt;p&gt;[edit3] A colleague of mine suggested that this might be simply Facebooks way of making it public knowledge that Tor hidden services can no longer be relied upon.&lt;p&gt;[edit4] Facebook are saying (on the Tor Talk list) that they generated a load of keys starting &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; and then just picked the one which looked most memorable, and were extremely lucky to get such a good one:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archives.seul.org/tor/talk/Oct-2014/msg00433.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archives.seul.org&amp;#x2F;tor&amp;#x2F;talk&amp;#x2F;Oct-2014&amp;#x2F;msg00433.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justcommenting</author><text>&amp;gt; Firstly, Onion service are very slow. There is no need to pay this cost for a service whose ownership is not actually hidden.&lt;p&gt;As long as you don&amp;#x27;t have to use it, I don&amp;#x27;t see why offering users a choice is a problem.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;If the Tor project made it easier to reliably identify traffic from Tor exit nodes, Facebook could apply whatever rules they wanted to Tor traffic without needing to slow things down for everyone.&lt;p&gt;ExoneraTor does this quite well in my opinion, and I don&amp;#x27;t follow how&amp;#x2F;why you think this will slow things down for everyone. Surely you&amp;#x27;re not referring to the entire Tor network?&lt;p&gt;The main value in using this, in my opinion, is reducing the potential attack surface associated with MITM attacks--including CDNs--after your traffic exits Tor. Attacks on Facebook users involving Akamai have been documented by NSA, for example; Facebook is a PRISM partner, but this would arguably still stack the deck in favor of &amp;quot;going through the front door&amp;quot; to access Facebook user data.</text></comment>