Re: [Sks-devel] Tor hidden service - what's the rationale?

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Fri 2015-11-13 20:36:40 -0500, Alain Wolf wrote:
> On 14.11.2015 at 01:23, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
>> On Sat, 2015-11-14 at 01:15 +0100, Hendrik Grewe wrote:
>>> I would imagine not leaving the tor network through an exit is the
>>> benefit.
>> And what should be the benefit of that?
> What is the benefit of leaving Tor?

There are definitely more benefits to operating a Tor "hidden service"
than server location privacy.

The Tor folks even acknowledge as much with their proposal for "direct
onion" services:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/special/torspec.git/tree/proposals/xxx-direct-onion.txt?h=xxx-direct-onion

For example, this allows the server operator to accept traffic that is
indistinguishable from Tor relay traffic.  It also allows end users to
look up the location of the service without using the DNS at all.

Those of us who have set up Tor hidden services are under no illusion
that we are some kind of superspooks or that this makes our users
magically invisible.  We're simply offering a service to eliminate one
more piece of visible metadata from the network for people who prefer to
minimize metadata.

Yes, there are more pieces of metadata that leak elsewhere.  Some of us
are actually working on those too.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop
the gaps we know how to stop.

        --dkg