Alternative Networks for this site - Tor

Last week I looked a few alternative censorship resistant networks and setup an I2P eepsite. This week I've made Exotic Security available as a Tor hidden service.

http://exoticsecv6kd6fw.onion

I like vanity domain names so first I downloaded Scallion and generated an onion address that started with 'exoticsec'.

Scallion was very easy to use, just a simple git clone, xbuild and then

mono scallion.exe -c exoticsec

I was very impressed with how well it ran, my GPU a GeForce GTX 680 got 470 MH/s and found two names that matched in under 10 hours¹.

I then installed Tor following their guide for Debian and set it to run automatically sudo systemctl enable tor.service

The I setup apache, I edited /etc/apache2/ports.conf

# Tor Hidden service
# Just a random port number I generated, there is no significance to it.
Listen 127.0.0.1:9625

my sites-enabled

# Tor Hidden Service
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:9625>
    # Host settings
    ServerName exoticsecv6kd6fw.onion

    ServerAdmin webmaster@xo.tc
    DocumentRoot /var/www/tor-hidden-service
    ErrorDocument 404 /pages/404-not-found.html

    # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
    # error, crit, alert, emerg.
    # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
    # modules, e.g.
    #LogLevel info ssl:warn

    # As we are hosting on localhost, by default the server-status and
    # server-info pages are avalible.
    <Location /server-status>
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
    </Location>
    <Location /server-info>
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
    </Location>


    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Then I edited /etc/tor/torrc and uncommented the two lines to enable a hidden service

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:9625

Restarted tor to create the HiddenServiceDir

systemctl restart tor.service

Then I replaced /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/private_key with the key I'd generate with Scallion and I was done.

I was surprised how easy it was to get up and running. Admittedly it might have been a bit more involved if I'd been trying to hide my identity, I probably would have used Whonix as the host instead but even so it was very easy to get up and going.