dash/doc/tor.md

TOR SUPPORT IN DASH CORE

It is possible to run Dash Core as a Tor onion service, and connect to such services.

The following directions assume you have a Tor proxy running on port 9050. Many distributions default to having a SOCKS proxy listening on port 9050, but others may not. In particular, the Tor Browser Bundle defaults to listening on port 9150. See Tor Project FAQ:TBBSocksPort for how to properly configure Tor.

Compatibility

• Starting with version 20.0, Dash Core only supports Tor version 3 hidden services (Tor v3). Tor v2 addresses are ignored by Dash Core and neither relayed nor stored.

• Tor removed v2 support beginning with version 0.4.6.

How to see information about your Tor configuration via Dash Core

There are several ways to see your local onion address in Dash Core:

• in the "Local addresses" output of CLI -netinfo
• in the "localaddresses" output of RPC getnetworkinfo
• in the debug log (grep for "AddLocal"; the Tor address ends in .onion)

You may set the -debug=tor config logging option to have additional information in the debug log about your Tor configuration.

CLI -addrinfo returns the number of addresses known to your node per network. This can be useful to see how many onion peers your node knows, e.g. for -onlynet=onion.

To fetch a number of onion addresses that your node knows, for example seven addresses, use the getnodeaddresses 7 onion RPC.

1. Run Dash Core behind a Tor proxy

The first step is running Dash Core behind a Tor proxy. This will already anonymize all outgoing connections, but more is possible.

-proxy=ip:port  Set the proxy server. If SOCKS5 is selected (default), this proxy
                server will be used to try to reach .onion addresses as well.
                You need to use -noonion or -onion=0 to explicitly disable
                outbound access to onion services.

-onion=ip:port  Set the proxy server to use for Tor onion services. You do not
                need to set this if it's the same as -proxy. You can use -onion=0
                to explicitly disable access to onion services.
                ------------------------------------------------------------------
                Note: Only the -proxy option sets the proxy for DNS requests;
                with -onion they will not route over Tor, so use -proxy if you
                have privacy concerns.
                ------------------------------------------------------------------

-listen         When using -proxy, listening is disabled by default. If you want
                to manually configure an onion service (see section 3), you'll
                need to enable it explicitly.

-connect=X      When behind a Tor proxy, you can specify .onion addresses instead
-addnode=X      of IP addresses or hostnames in these parameters. It requires
-seednode=X     SOCKS5. In Tor mode, such addresses can also be exchanged with
                other P2P nodes.

-onlynet=onion  Make automatic outbound connections only to .onion addresses.
                Inbound and manual connections are not affected by this option.
                It can be specified multiple times to allow multiple networks,
                e.g. onlynet=onion, onlynet=i2p, onlynet=cjdns.

An example how to start the client if the Tor proxy is running on local host on port 9050 and only allows .onion nodes to connect:

./dashd -onion=127.0.0.1:9050 -onlynet=onion -listen=0 -addnode=ssapp53tmftyjmjb.onion

In a typical situation, this suffices to run behind a Tor proxy:

./dashd -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050

2. Automatically create a Dash Core onion service

Dash Core makes use of Tor's control socket API to create and destroy ephemeral onion services programmatically. This means that if Tor is running and proper authentication has been configured, Dash Core automatically creates an onion service to listen on. The goal is to increase the number of available onion nodes.

This feature is enabled by default if Dash Core is listening (-listen) and it requires a Tor connection to work. It can be explicitly disabled with -listenonion=0. If it is not disabled, it can be configured using the -torcontrol and -torpassword settings.

To see verbose Tor information in the dashd debug log, pass -debug=tor.

Control Port

You may need to set up the Tor Control Port. On Linux distributions there may be some or all of the following settings in /etc/tor/torrc, generally commented out by default (if not, add them):

ControlPort 9051
CookieAuthentication 1
CookieAuthFileGroupReadable 1
DataDirectoryGroupReadable 1

Add or uncomment those, save, and restart Tor (usually systemctl restart tor or sudo systemctl restart tor on most systemd-based systems, including recent Debian and Ubuntu, or just restart the computer).

Authentication

Connecting to Tor's control socket API requires one of two authentication methods to be configured: cookie authentication or dashd's -torpassword configuration option.

Cookie authentication

For cookie authentication, the user running dashd must have read access to the CookieAuthFile specified in the Tor configuration. In some cases this is preconfigured and the creation of an onion service is automatic. Don't forget to use the -debug=tor dashd configuration option to enable Tor debug logging.

If a permissions problem is seen in the debug log, e.g. tor: Authentication cookie /run/tor/control.authcookie could not be opened (check permissions), it can be resolved by adding both the user running Tor and the user running dashd to the same Tor group and setting permissions appropriately.

On Debian-derived systems, the Tor group will likely be debian-tor and one way to verify could be to list the groups and grep for a "tor" group name:

getent group | cut -d: -f1 | grep -i tor

You can also check the group of the cookie file. On most Linux systems, the Tor auth cookie will usually be /run/tor/control.authcookie:

TORGROUP=$(stat -c '%G' /run/tor/control.authcookie)

Once you have determined the ${TORGROUP} and selected the ${USER} that will run dashd, run this as root:

usermod -a -G ${TORGROUP} ${USER}

Then restart the computer (or log out) and log in as the ${USER} that will run dashd.

torpassword authentication

For the -torpassword=password option, the password is the clear text form that was used when generating the hashed password for the HashedControlPassword option in the Tor configuration file.

The hashed password can be obtained with the command tor --hash-password password (refer to the Tor Dev Manual for more details).

3. Manually create a Dash Core onion service

If you configure your Tor system accordingly, it is possible to make your node also reachable from the Tor network. Add these lines to your /etc/tor/torrc (or equivalent config file): Needed for Tor version 0.2.7.0 and older versions of Tor only. For newer versions of Tor see Section 4.

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/dashcore-service/
HiddenServicePort 9999 127.0.0.1:9996

The directory can be different of course, but virtual port numbers should be equal to your dashd's P2P listen port (9999 by default), and target addresses and ports should be equal to binding address and port for inbound Tor connections (127.0.0.1:9996 by default).

-externalip=X   You can tell Dash Core about its publicly reachable addresses using
                this option, and this can be an onion address. Given the above
                configuration, you can find your onion address in
                /var/lib/tor/dashcore-service/hostname. For connections
                coming from unroutable addresses (such as 127.0.0.1, where the
                Tor proxy typically runs), onion addresses are given
                preference for your node to advertise itself with.

                You can set multiple local addresses with -externalip. The
                one that will be rumoured to a particular peer is the most
                compatible one and also using heuristics, e.g. the address
                with the most incoming connections, etc.

-listen         You'll need to enable listening for incoming connections, as this
                is off by default behind a proxy.

-discover       When -externalip is specified, no attempt is made to discover local
                IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. If you want to run a dual stack, reachable
                from both Tor and IPv4 (or IPv6), you'll need to either pass your
                other addresses using -externalip, or explicitly enable -discover.
                Note that both addresses of a dual-stack system may be easily
                linkable using traffic analysis.

In a typical situation, where you're only reachable via Tor, this should suffice:

./dashd -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 -externalip=7zvj7a2imdgkdbg4f2dryd5rgtrn7upivr5eeij4cicjh65pooxeshid.onion -listen

(obviously, replace the .onion address with your own). It should be noted that you still listen on all devices and another node could establish a clearnet connection, when knowing your address. To mitigate this, additionally bind the address of your Tor proxy:

./dashd ... -bind=127.0.0.1

If you don't care too much about hiding your node, and want to be reachable on IPv4 as well, use discover instead:

./dashd ... -discover

and open port 9999 on your firewall (or use port mapping, i.e., -upnp or -natpmp).

If you only want to use Tor to reach .onion addresses, but not use it as a proxy for normal IPv4/IPv6 communication, use:

./dashd -onion=127.0.0.1:9050 -externalip=7zvj7a2imdgkdbg4f2dryd5rgtrn7upivr5eeij4cicjh65pooxeshid.onion -discover

3.1. List of known Dash Core Tor relays

cmhr5r3lqhy7ic2ebeil66ftcz5u62zq5qhbfdz53l6sqxljh7zxntyd.onion k532fqvgzqotj6epfw3rfc377elrj3td47ztad2tkn6vwnw6nhxacrqd.onion v7ttoiov7rc5aut64nfomyfwxt424ihufwvr5ilf7moeg3fwibjpjcqd.onion snu2xaql3crh2b4t6g2wxemgrpzmaxfxla4tua63bnp2phhxwr6hzzid.onion fq63mjtyamklhxtskvvdf7tcdckwvtoo7kb5eazi34tsxuvexveyroad.onion 5v5lgddolcidtt2qmhmvyka2ewht4mkmmj73tfwuimlckgmqb5lthtid.onion

You can easily validate which of these are still online via nc such as

nc -v -x 127.0.0.1:9050 -z *.onion 9999

4. Privacy recommendations

• Do not add anything but Dash Core ports to the onion service created in section 3. If you run a web service too, create a new onion service for that. Otherwise it is trivial to link them, which may reduce privacy. Onion services created automatically (as in section 2) always have only one port open.