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$Id: tor-spec.txt 9411 2007-01-26 01:59:50Z nickm $ Tor Protocol Specification Roger Dingledine Nick Mathewson Note: This document aims to specify Tor as implemented in 0.1.2.x and earlier. Future versions of Tor may implement improved protocols, and compatibility is not guaranteed. This specification 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. 0. Preliminaries 0.1. Notation and encoding 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. H(m) -- a cryptographic hash of m. 0.2. Security parameters Tor uses a stream cipher, a public-key cipher, the Diffie-Hellman protocol, and a hash function. KEY_LEN -- the length of the stream cipher's key, in bytes. PK_ENC_LEN -- the length of a public-key encrypted message, in bytes. PK_PAD_LEN -- the number of bytes added in padding for public-key encryption, in bytes. (The largest number of bytes that can be encrypted in a single public-key operation is therefore PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN.) DH_LEN -- the number of bytes used to represent a member of the Diffie-Hellman group. DH_SEC_LEN -- the number of bytes used in a Diffie-Hellman private key (x). HASH_LEN -- the length of the hash function's output, in bytes. PAYLOAD_LEN -- The longest allowable cell payload, in bytes. (509) CELL_LEN -- The length of a Tor cell, in bytes. 0.3. Ciphers For a stream cipher, we use 128-bit AES in counter mode, with an IV of all 0 bytes. For a public-key cipher, we use RSA with 1024-bit keys and a fixed exponent of 65537. We use OAEP-MGF1 padding, with SHA-1 as its digest function. We leave optional the "Label" parameter unset. (For OAEP padding, see ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-1/pkcs-1v2-1.pdf) For Diffie-Hellman, we use a generator (g) of 2. For the modulus (p), we use the 1024-bit safe prime from rfc2409 section 6.2 whose hex representation is: "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC90FDAA22168C234C4C6628B80DC1CD129024E08" "8A67CC74020BBEA63B139B22514A08798E3404DDEF9519B3CD3A431B" "302B0A6DF25F14374FE1356D6D51C245E485B576625E7EC6F44C42E9" "A637ED6B0BFF5CB6F406B7EDEE386BFB5A899FA5AE9F24117C4B1FE6" "49286651ECE65381FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF" As an optimization, implementations SHOULD choose DH private keys (x) of 320 bits. Implementations that do this MUST never use any DH key more than once. [May other implementations reuse their DH keys?? -RD] [Probably not. Conceivably, you could get away with changing DH keys once per second, but there are too many oddball attacks for me to be comfortable that this is safe. -NM] For a hash function, we use SHA-1. KEY_LEN=16. DH_LEN=128; DH_SEC_LEN=40. PK_ENC_LEN=128; PK_PAD_LEN=42. HASH_LEN=20. When we refer to "the hash of a public key", we mean the SHA-1 hash of the DER encoding of an ASN.1 RSA public key (as specified in PKCS.1). All "random" values should be generated with a cryptographically strong random number generator, unless otherwise noted. The "hybrid encryption" of a byte sequence M with a public key PK is computed as follows: 1. If M is less than PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN, pad and encrypt M with PK. 2. Otherwise, generate a KEY_LEN byte random key K. Let M1 = the first PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN-KEY_LEN bytes of M, and let M2 = the rest of M. Pad and encrypt K|M1 with PK. Encrypt M2 with our stream cipher, using the key K. Concatenate these encrypted values. [XXX Note that this "hybrid encryption" approach does not prevent an attacker from adding or removing bytes to the end of M. It also allows attackers to modify the bytes not covered by the OAEP -- see Goldberg's PET2006 paper for details. We will add a MAC to this scheme one day. -RD] 0.4. Other parameter values CELL_LEN=512 1. System overview Tor 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. 1.1. Keys and names Every Tor server has multiple public/private keypairs: - A long-term signing-only "Identity key" used to sign documents and certificates, and used to establish server identity. - A medium-term "Onion key" used to decrypt onion skins when accepting circuit extend attempts. (See 5.1.) Old keys MUST be accepted for at least one week after they are no longer advertised. Because of this, servers MUST retain old keys for a while after they're rotated. - A short-term "Connection key" used to negotiate TLS connections. Tor implementations MAY rotate this key as often as they like, and SHOULD rotate this key at least once a day. Tor servers are also identified by "nicknames"; these are specified in dir-spec.txt. 2. Connections Tor uses TLS for link authentication and 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 KEY_LEN bits, and digests of at least HASH_LEN bits. Even though the connection protocol is identical, we think of the initiator as either an onion router (OR) if it is willing to relay traffic for other Tor users, or an onion proxy (OP) if it only handles local requests. Onion proxies SHOULD NOT provide long-term-trackable identifiers in their handshakes. During the TLS handshake, the connection initiator always sends a two-certificate chain, consisting of an X.509 certificate using a short-term connection public key and a second, self- signed X.509 certificate containing its identity key. The commonName of the first certificate is the OR's nickname, and the commonName of the second certificate is the OR's nickname, followed by a space and the string "<identity>". The other party sends a similar certificate chain. Implementations running Protocol 1 and earlier use an organizationName of "Tor" or "TOR". Future implementations (which support the version negotiation protocol in section 4.1) MUST NOT have either of these values for their organizationName. 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 CELL_LEN 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. TLS connections are not permanent. Either side may close a connection if there are no circuits running over it and an amount of time (KeepalivePeriod, defaults to 5 minutes) has passed. (As an exception, directory servers may try to stay connected to all of the ORs -- though this will be phased out for the Tor 0.1.2.x release.) 3. Cell Packet format The basic unit of communication for onion routers and onion proxies is a fixed-width "cell". On a version 1 connection, each cell contains the following fields: CircID [2 bytes] Command [1 byte] Payload (padded with 0 bytes) [PAYLOAD_LEN 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 7.2) 1 -- CREATE (Create a circuit) (See Sec 5.1) 2 -- CREATED (Acknowledge create) (See Sec 5.1) 3 -- RELAY (End-to-end data) (See Sec 5.5 and 6) 4 -- DESTROY (Stop using a circuit) (See Sec 5.4) 5 -- CREATE_FAST (Create a circuit, no PK) (See Sec 5.1) 6 -- CREATED_FAST (Circuit created, no PK) (See Sec 5.1) 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 contains a reason for closing the circuit. (see 5.4) Upon receiving any other value for the command field, an OR must drop the cell. [XXXX Versions prior to 0.1.0.?? logged a warning when dropping the cell; this is bad behavior. -NM] 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. [This section deliberately left blank.] 5. Circuit management 5.1. 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 5.2). 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). This value is hybrid-encrypted (see 0.3) to Bob's onion key, giving an onion-skin of: PK-encrypted: Padding padding [PK_PAD_LEN bytes] Symmetric key [KEY_LEN bytes] First part of g^x [PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN-KEY_LEN bytes] Symmetrically encrypted: Second part of g^x [DH_LEN-(PK_ENC_LEN-PK_PAD_LEN-KEY_LEN) bytes] The relay payload for an EXTEND relay cell consists of: Address [4 bytes] Port [2 bytes] Onion skin [DH_LEN+KEY_LEN+PK_PAD_LEN bytes] Identity fingerprint [HASH_LEN 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 hash of the PKCS#1 ASN1 encoding of the next onion router's identity (signing) key. (See 0.3 above.) (Including this hash allows the extending OR verify that it is indeed connected to the correct target OR, and prevents certain man-in-the-middle attacks.) The payload for a CREATED cell, or the relay payload for an EXTENDED cell, contains: DH data (g^y) [DH_LEN bytes] Derivative key data (KH) [HASH_LEN bytes] <see 5.2 below> 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. As usual with DH, x and y MUST be generated randomly. [ To implement backward-compatible version negotiation, parties MUST drop CREATE cells with all-[00] onion-skins. ] 5.1.1. CREATE_FAST/CREATED_FAST cells When initializing the first hop of a circuit, the OP has already established the OR's identity and negotiated a secret key using TLS. Because of this, it is not always necessary for the OP to perform the public key operations to create a circuit. In this case, the OP MAY send a CREATE_FAST cell instead of a CREATE cell for the first hop only. The OR responds with a CREATED_FAST cell, and the circuit is created. A CREATE_FAST cell contains: Key material (X) [HASH_LEN bytes] A CREATED_FAST cell contains: Key material (Y) [HASH_LEN bytes] Derivative key data [HASH_LEN bytes] (See 5.2 below) The values of X and Y must be generated randomly. [Versions of Tor before 0.1.0.6-rc did not support these cell types; clients should not send CREATE_FAST cells to older Tor servers.] If an OR sees a circuit created with CREATE_FAST, the OR is sure to be the first hop of a circuit. ORs SHOULD reject attempts to create streams with RELAY_BEGIN exiting the circuit at the first hop: letting Tor be used as a single hop proxy makes exit nodes a more attractive target for compromise. 5.2. Setting circuit keys Once the handshake between the OP and an OR is completed, both can now calculate g^xy with ordinary DH. Before computing g^xy, both client and server MUST verify that the received g^x or g^y value is not degenerate; that is, it must be strictly greater than 1 and strictly less than p-1 where p is the DH modulus. Implementations MUST NOT complete a handshake with degenerate keys. Implementations MUST NOT discard other "weak" g^x values. (Discarding degenerate keys is critical for security; if bad keys are not discarded, an attacker can substitute the server's CREATED cell's g^y with 0 or 1, thus creating a known g^xy and impersonating the server. Discarding other keys may allow attacks to learn bits of the private key.) (The mainline Tor implementation, in the 0.1.1.x-alpha series, discarded all g^x values less than 2^24, greater than p-2^24, or having more than 1024-16 identical bits. This served no useful purpose, and we stopped.) If CREATE or EXTEND is used to extend a circuit, the client and server base their key material on K0=g^xy, represented as a big-endian unsigned integer. If CREATE_FAST is used, the client and server base their key material on K0=X|Y. From the base key material K0, they compute KEY_LEN*2+HASH_LEN*3 bytes of derivative key data as K = H(K0 | [00]) | H(K0 | [01]) | H(K0 | [02]) | ... The first HASH_LEN bytes of K form KH; the next HASH_LEN form the forward digest Df; the next HASH_LEN 41-60 form the backward digest Db; the next KEY_LEN 61-76 form Kf, and the final KEY_LEN form Kb. Excess bytes from K are discarded. 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. 5.3. 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 includes at least one pending stream that needs a circuit (if there are any). 2. Choose a chain of (N-1) 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 onion 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 5.1. above, concerning choosing circIDs based on lexicographic order of nicknames.) 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.) 5.4. 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 6.1). After a DESTROY cell has been processed, an OR ignores all data or destroy cells for the corresponding circuit. 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. The payload of a RELAY_TRUNCATED or DESTROY cell contains a single octet, describing why the circuit is being closed or truncated. When sending a TRUNCATED or DESTROY cell because of another TRUNCATED or DESTROY cell, the error code should be propagated. The origin of a circuit always sets this error code to 0, to avoid leaking its version. The error codes are: 0 -- NONE (No reason given.) 1 -- PROTOCOL (Tor protocol violation.) 2 -- INTERNAL (Internal error.) 3 -- REQUESTED (A client sent a TRUNCATE command.) 4 -- HIBERNATING (Not currently operating; trying to save bandwidth.) 5 -- RESOURCELIMIT (Out of memory, sockets, or circuit IDs.) 6 -- CONNECTFAILED (Unable to reach server.) 7 -- OR_IDENTITY (Connected to server, but its OR identity was not as expected.) 8 -- OR_CONN_CLOSED (The OR connection that was carrying this circuit died.) 9 -- FINISHED (The circuit has expired for being dirty or old.) 10 -- TIMEOUT (Circuit construction took too long) 11 -- DESTROYED (The circuit was destroyed w/o client TRUNCATE) 12 -- NOSUCHSERVICE (Request for unknown hidden service) [Versions of Tor prior to 0.1.0.11 didn't send reasons; implementations MUST accept empty TRUNCATED and DESTROY cells.] 5.5. 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 the stream cipher, 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. Note that in counter mode, decrypt and encrypt are the same operation. The OR then decides whether it recognizes the relay cell, by inspecting the payload as described in section 6.1 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 the stream cipher as follows: OP receives data cell: For I=N...1, Decrypt with Kb_I. If the payload is recognized (see section 6..1), then stop and process the payload. For more information, see section 6 below. 6. Application connections and stream management 6.1. 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 [CELL_LEN-14 bytes] The relay commands are: 1 -- RELAY_BEGIN [forward] 2 -- RELAY_DATA [forward or backward] 3 -- RELAY_END [forward or backward] 4 -- RELAY_CONNECTED [backward] 5 -- RELAY_SENDME [forward or backward] [sometimes control] 6 -- RELAY_EXTEND [forward] [control] 7 -- RELAY_EXTENDED [backward] [control] 8 -- RELAY_TRUNCATE [forward] [control] 9 -- RELAY_TRUNCATED [backward] [control] 10 -- RELAY_DROP [forward or backward] [control] 11 -- RELAY_RESOLVE [forward] 12 -- RELAY_RESOLVED [backward] 13 -- RELAY_BEGIN_DIR [forward] Commands labelled as "forward" must only be sent by the originator of the circuit. Commands labelled as "backward" must only be sent by other nodes in the circuit back to the originator. Commands marked as either can be sent either by the originator or other nodes. 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 digest of all the bytes that have been destined for this hop of the circuit or originated from this hop of the circuit, seeded from Df or Db respectively (obtained in section 5.2 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 5.5 above). (The digest does not include any bytes from relay cells that do not start or end at this hop of the circuit. That is, it does not include forwarded data. Therefore if 'recognized' is zero but the digest does not match, the running digest at that node should not be updated, and the cell should be forwarded on.) All RELAY cells pertaining to the same tunneled stream have the same stream ID. StreamIDs are chosen arbitrarily by the OP. RELAY cells that affect the entire circuit rather than a particular stream use a StreamID of zero -- they are marked in the table above as "[control]" style cells. (Sendme cells are marked as "sometimes control" because they can take include a StreamID or not depending on their purpose -- see Section 7.) 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. If the RELAY cell is recognized but the relay command is not understood, the cell must be dropped and ignored. Its contents still count with respect to the digests, though. [Before 0.1.1.10, Tor closed circuits when it received an unknown relay command. Perhaps this will be more forward-compatible. -RD] 6.2. 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 6.4 below.) Otherwise, the exit node replies with a RELAY_CONNECTED cell, whose payload is in one of the following formats: The IPv4 address to which the connection was made [4 octets] A number of seconds (TTL) for which the address may be cached [4 octets] or Four zero-valued octets [4 octets] An address type (6) [1 octet] The IPv6 address to which the connection was made [16 octets] A number of seconds (TTL) for which the address may be cached [4 octets] [XXXX Versions of Tor before 0.1.1.6 ignore and do not generate the TTL field. No version of Tor currently generates the IPv6 format. Tor servers before 0.1.2.0 set the TTL field to a fixed value. Later versions set the TTL to the last value seen from a DNS server, and expire their own cached entries after a fixed interval. This prevents certain attacks.] 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. 6.2.1. Opening a directory stream If a Tor server is a directory server, it should respond to a RELAY_BEGIN_DIR cell as if it had received a BEGIN cell requesting a connection to its directory port. RELAY_BEGIN_DIR cells ignore exit policy, since the stream is local to the Tor process. If the Tor server is not running a directory service, it should respond with a REASON_NOTDIRECTORY RELAY_END cell. Clients MUST generate an all-zero payload for RELAY_BEGIN_DIR cells, and servers MUST ignore the payload. [RELAY_BEGIN_DIR was not supported before Tor 0.1.2.2-alpha; clients SHOULD NOT send it to routers running earlier versions of Tor.] 6.3. 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.) 14 -- REASON_NOTDIRECTORY (Client sent RELAY_BEGIN_DIR to a non-directory server.) (With REASON_EXITPOLICY, the 4-byte IPv4 address or 16-byte IPv6 address forms the optional data; no other reason currently has extra data. As of 0.1.1.6, the body also contains a 4-byte TTL.) 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. 6.4. 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) TTL (4 octets) "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. 7. Flow control 7.1. 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. 7.2. Link padding Link padding can be created by sending PADDING cells along the connection; relay cells of type "DROP" can be used for long-range 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. 7.3. 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] 7.4. 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. 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.