V3 onion services usage

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2021-09-24 17:30:04

With the deprecation of V2 onion services right around the corner, it is a good time to talk about V3 onion services. This post will discuss the most important privacy improvements provided by V3 onion services as well as their limitations. Aware of those limitations, our research group at the Institute of Network and Security at JKU Linz conducted an experiment that extracts information about how V3 onion services are being used from the Tor network.

The most obvious difference between V2 and V3 onion services is the different address format. V3 onion addresses have 56 characters instead of 16 (because they contain a full ed25519 public key, not just the hash of a public key), meaning that migrating from V2 to V3 requires all users to learn/remember/save a new onion address address.

The main reason behind this change is tied to a key component of all onion services, the hidden service directory. Its purpose is to provide the information needed to connect to a specified onion address (just like the DNS system does for regular domain names). To protect the privacy of onion service users, the hidden service directory is a distributed hash table formed by all Tor relays which possess the HSDir flag. For V2 onion services, the data published in the hidden service directory is uploaded in plain text, meaning that the Tor relays with the HSDir flag can learn a lot of information about a small fraction of running V2 onion services (most importantly the onion address) every day.

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