$Id$ Tor Protocol Specification Roger Dingledine Nick Mathewson Note: This is an attempt to specify Tor as currently implemented. Future versions of Tor will implement improved protocols, and compatibility is not guaranteed. This 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. 0. Notation: 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. Unless otherwise specified, all symmetric ciphers are AES in counter mode, with an IV of all 0 bytes. Asymmetric ciphers are either RSA with 1024-bit keys and exponents of 65537, or DH with the safe prime from rfc2409, section 6.2, whose hex representation is: "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC90FDAA22168C234C4C6628B80DC1CD129024E08" "8A67CC74020BBEA63B139B22514A08798E3404DDEF9519B3CD3A431B" "302B0A6DF25F14374FE1356D6D51C245E485B576625E7EC6F44C42E9" "A637ED6B0BFF5CB6F406B7EDEE386BFB5A899FA5AE9F24117C4B1FE6" "49286651ECE65381FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF" All "hashes" are 20-byte SHA1 cryptographic digests. When we refer to "the hash of a public key", we mean the SHA1 hash of the ASN.1 encoding of an RSA public key (as specified in PKCS.1). 1. System overview Onion Routing 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 128 bits, and digests of at least 160 bits. An OP or OR always sends a two-certificate chain, consisting of a self-signed certificate containing the OR's identity key, and a second certificate using a short-term connection key. The commonName of the second certificate is the OR's nickname, and the commonName of the first 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 512 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. OR-to-OR connections are never deliberately closed. When an OR starts or receives a new directory, it tries to open new connections to any OR it is not already connected to. [not true, unused OR conns close after 5 mins too -RD] OR-to-OP connections are not permanent. An OP should 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. 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) [509 bytes] [Total size: 512 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) 2 -- CREATED (Acknowledge create) (See Sec 4) 3 -- RELAY (End-to-end data) (See Sec 5) 4 -- DESTROY (Stop using a circuit) (See Sec 4) 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 is unused. 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. 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). The data is encrypted to Bob's PK as follows: Suppose Bob's PK is L octets long. If the data to be encrypted is shorter than L-42, then it is encrypted directly (with OAEP padding). If the data is at least as long as L-42, then a randomly generated 16-byte symmetric key is prepended to the data, after which the first L-16-42 bytes of the data are encrypted with Bob's PK; and the rest of the data is encrypted with the symmetric key. So in this case, the onion skin on the wire looks like: RSA-encrypted: OAEP padding [42 bytes] Symmetric key [16 bytes] First part of g^x [70 bytes] Symmetrically encrypted: Second part of g^x [58 bytes] The relay payload for an EXTEND relay cell consists of: Address [4 bytes] Port [2 bytes] Onion skin [186 bytes] Public key hash [20 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 SHA1 hash of the PKCS#1 ASN1 encoding of the next onion router's identity (signing) key. The payload for a CREATED cell, or the relay payload for an EXTENDED cell, contains: DH data (g^y) [128 bytes] Derivative key data (KH) [20 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. (Older versions of Tor compared OR nicknames, and did it in a broken and unreliable way. To support versions of Tor earlier than 0.0.9pre6, implementations should notice when the other side of a connection is sending CREATE cells with the "wrong" MSG, and switch accordingly.) 4.2. Setting circuit keys Once the handshake between the OP and an OR is completed, both servers can now calculate g^xy with ordinary DH. From the base key material g^xy, they compute derivative key material as follows. First, the server represents g^xy as a big-endian unsigned integer. Next, the server computes 100 bytes of key data as K = SHA1(g^xy | [00]) | SHA1(g^xy | [01]) | ... SHA1(g^xy | [04]) where "00" is a single octet whose value is zero, [01] is a single octet whose value is one, etc. The first 20 bytes of K form KH, bytes 21-40 form the forward digest Df, 41-60 form the backward digest Db, 61-76 form Kf, and 77-92 form Kb. 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 does not exclude all pending streams that need a circuit. 2. Choose a chain of (N-1) chain of N 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.) As an extension (called router twins), if the desired next onion router R in the circuit is down, and some other onion router R' has the same public keys as R, then it's ok to extend to R' rather than R. 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. (The rest of this section is not currently used; on errors, circuits are destroyed, not truncated.) 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. 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 AES/CTR, 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. 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 AES/CTR 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 [498 bytes] The relay commands are: 1 -- RELAY_BEGIN 2 -- RELAY_DATA 3 -- RELAY_END 4 -- RELAY_CONNECTED 5 -- RELAY_SENDME 6 -- RELAY_EXTEND 7 -- RELAY_EXTENDED 8 -- RELAY_TRUNCATE 9 -- RELAY_TRUNCATED 10 -- RELAY_DROP 11 -- RELAY_RESOLVE 12 -- RELAY_RESOLVED 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 SHA-1 digest of all the bytes that have travelled over this 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). All RELAY cells pertaining to the same tunneled stream have the same stream ID. StreamIDs are chosen randomly 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. 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 the 4-byte IPv4 address or the 16-byte IPv6 address to which the connection was made. 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.) 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) "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. Directories and routers 7.1. 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 a space 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 SP ArgumentsChar+ NL Keyword = KeywordChar+ KeywordChar ::= 'A' ... 'Z' | 'a' ... 'z' | '0' ... '9' | '-' ArgumentChar ::= any printing ASCII character except NL. 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. 7.1. 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 Port values will soon be deprecated; using them here is equivalent to using them in a "ports" item. "ports" ORPort SocksPort DirPort Indicates 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 the port at which this OR accepts SOCKS connections; 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 (20 byte SHA1 hash of asn1 encoded public key, encoded in hex, with spaces 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 SHA1 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 space-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. 7.2. 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" space-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 "$" followed by a hexadecimal encoding of the hash of an OR's identity key. If the "!" is included, the router is believed not to be running; otherwise, it is believed to be running. If a router's nickname is given, exactly one router of that nickname will appear in the directory, and that router is "approved" by the directory server. If a hashed identity key is given, that OR is not "approved". [XXXX The 'running-routers' line is only provided for backward compatibility. New code should parse 'router-status' instead.] "router-status" space-separated-list A description of which routers are currently believed to be up or down, and which are verified or unverified. Contains one entry for every router that the directory server knows. Each entry is of the format: !name=$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 Note: The router descriptor for the directory server MUST appear first. The signature is computed by computing the SHA-1 hash 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 should reject only that router descriptor, and continue using the others. If it encounters an unrecognized keyword in the directory header, it should reject the entire directory. 7.3. 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 7.2 above) "router-status" list (see 7.2 above) "directory-signature" NL signature (see 7.2 above) 7.4. 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.