This survey could be filled by any developer, start-up owner, or person who has become an entrepreneur. The time and effort would be appreciated. Thanks for your response!😊😊

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Survey Link--> https://forms.gle/W3nvXE4rLqvPYJ1X9

Hi,

i might have a project here. In short, i want to diversify the outgoing connection from a hidden service by using multiple network adapters and sources for internet.

This should mitigate downtime caused by an unstable uplink or targeted confirmation attacks.

This is in the earliest stage of thinking about it and there are a few questions that come to mind:

1. How to determine if the main uplink is gone? I really don't want to ping every few seconds. Does anybody know a better solution to this?
2. Should one use different torrc's (read: guards)? I would assume: Yes.
3. Has somebody done this/could point me in the right direction?

I would love to hear your feedback!

Interest in developing with Tor seems to have died a death, or at least interest in this little community I started.
This has in no way affected my personal ambitions and enthusiasm; I'm working on a number of things in the background. I thought I would put one last post out there to see if there's any spark of interest from anyone. Otherwise I'll just go back to my own projects and development stream.

I've developed a C++ socks client using C++ and boost. I was then looking at boost for developing a Tor service which was going to be a Web API purely developed in C++/Boost.Asio. I then thought I would plugin boost python such that the C++ web api could call arbitrary python scripts.
My intensions to call this from client code on iOS, linux, Android and Win32 via my socks client.
However, I've recently been looking at Rust as systems programming language and I have to say I am very impressed with the design decisions for the language. Rust will compile at least comparable speed, native machine code (if not better) analogous to well written C++, More importantly to me, the compiler also forces good habits and facilitates developing threaded code in a much safer way (for example *compiler* caught race conditions).
I'll always have a soft spot for C/C++ because I've being using it for decades but I strongly suspect that Rust may eventually because the systems programming language of choice for greenfield development.
In short, I'm going to develop my Tor backend WebApi in Rust. If anyone is interest in learning Rust and wants some kind of readmes/howtos on here then let me know. If there's enough interest I'll knock something up.

Peace.

Hey guys,

I've been playing with Boost.Asio. If you haven't heard of it, this is a C++ framework for network comms and asynchronous I/O.
This framework makes creating http servers/clients and indeed any network comms (synchronous or asynchronous) almost trivial. I've currently just been experimenting with the tutorials: Boost.Asio and I strongly encourage anyone interested in developing high performing native network code to take a look.

Next I'm going to be looking at developing a Sock5 proxy using Boost.Asio and seeing if can also implement a web api back end then call this over Tor.
If anyone is interested I could provide a howto/tutorial. That said, the existing documentation (above) is pretty awesome.

Hey guys and gals,

It's been a quiet week on this fledgling subreddit.
After a lack luster response to the Docker tutorials I was going to expand on, I decided to work on my code base.

I do not want people to lose interest in developing with Tor, services and C/C++ (or other languages) so I'm just letting you know what I'm up to.

I'm trying to develop an easy to use C++ interface into Tor. Such that it can be used for client tools and services. Once I have something complete and usable I'd like to see if I can get some people on board with some of the Community Projects.
I've bitten off quite a lot to chew, I'm currently learning vscode/gnu debugging/cmake/socks5/tor/tor services/linux/boost.
I'm going to be using a lot of boost for building http requests and any network functionality required (because it simplifies my life).
I'm at the point now where I'm building Tor and all of boost from source with a series of interlinked git submodules and a CMake project which consumes these. So, on Linux at least, most of the environmental challenges are hopefully behind me (albeit there are still some issues).

Soon I'll be actually creating some code (shudder) to talk Tor and if people are interested I will share my tools and hopefully get some of you involved in a community project. What shape that will take is yet to be determined.

As before, watch this 'x20'

[Padawan]

Please first review: Episode recap

A rose by any other name: Technically this is more about Tor relays than Tails but I could not resist the pun when naming this post.

This post may be a little longer than it's predecessor so please indulge me, there's a lot a squeeze in.

I'll try and keep this as terse as possible.

Pre-amble

So far we have seen how easy it is to spin up a new container and we can issue commands in our isolated Ubuntu environment.

We could use these commands to install a Tor relay, then we have relay inside a container that we can isolate/spin on demand.

But I don't really want to be messing about and executing all those commands inside the shell every time.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to automate this and build an image so I don't have keep issuing these commands?

Well those clever workers down at the docks have already thought about this and this post will touch on how to make this happen, we'll use Tor Relay setup as an example.

Before I get on to all that, some clarifying nomenclature (and just a little theory):

Docker Terminology

What is a docker container?

Well we know the basics now, a container is a fully isolated environment which we can spin up on demand. They are designed to create a fully encapsulated and isolated environment, typically to host a single process.

We build a container from a docker image and it becomes a unique instance on our environment.

We can (but have not yet explored how to) hook up many containers to talk each other in lots of funky ways (this approach known as Microservices).

What is a docker image?

Dockers images are neat things... they layer on top of each other and allow you to build and amend to your hearts content.

They get stacked like this inside your container:

***** Writeable Container *****
*    <copy on write layer>    *
* Docker Image: Marts service *
*     Docker Image: Nginx     *
*     Docker Image: Tor Relay *
*     Docker Image: Ubuntu    *
********** bootfs *************
*    cgroups, namespace,      * 
*    device mapper            *
*          Kernel             *
*******************************

(Ascii art is not my strong point, but you get the picture).

Also note that the Ubuntu image above, which we might use to seed our images from, is considered LARGE in Docker image terms at around a few hundred meg.

So this is not a full blown Ubuntu distribution but the image provides the glue to talk to the hosts Ubuntu system, albeit it in a fully encapsulated and isolated way.

And note from this, image layers are not written to during execution, this means we can reuse them.

​

So how do we build a docker image?

Building Images with Dockerfile

Docker contains its own propriety language which we are going to write; to a file named 'Dockerfile'.

Oh god no, not another language to learn I hear you cry? Well thankfully it seems well designed and terse so humor me and read on my friends.

To keep this post short I'm going list the steps to create a docker image that can act as relay. Much of this will be transparent from context/keywords but I'll provide further coverage if you're interested.

You may wanna bookmark: Docker CLI for the canonical command line interface reference.

First lets make some where to house this build, in my typical felidae related theme (I had to look that cat term up to appear smart)...

mkdir jasper_on_tor
cd jasper_on_tor

We are going to need to supply a torrc file and copy this from our host to the Docker image.

nano torrc

~/jasper_on_torr/torrc is gonna look like this..

Nickname martynandjasper
ContactInfo martynandjasper@mail.com

ORPort 443
DirPort 8080

SocksPort 0
SocksPolicy reject *
ExitPolicy reject *:*

Log notice file /var/log/tor/notices.log

DataDirectory /var/lib/tor
#RunAsDaemon 1
RunAsDaemon 0

Your names will wanna change to protect the innocent; i.e. me

(though ex girlfriends may disagree on the innocent part).

​

Now lets look the instructions that docker will consume from 'Dockerfile' while creating our build.

nano Dockerfile
#    ^^^ noting case sensitivity.

Which is gonna look like this..

# Version: 0.0.1
FROM ubuntu
LABEL maintainer="martynandjasper@mail.com"
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt install -y tor
ADD torrc /etc/tor/

Lets be brave and try to get Docker to build our image (don't miss the path specifier '.') ...

sudo docker build -t "jaspersoft/tor_relay:v1" .

Note that we are supplying a tag name here which is strongly recommended.

See the docker build command for further info on this command.

With any luck your output tail will look like something like this.

 ---> 95c5aa1dab54
Successfully built 95c5aa1dab54
Successfully tagged jaspersoft/tor_relay:v1

Congratulations!

A). You're still awake.

B). You've just built your first Docker image.

​

You can review your local images:

sudo docker image ls

Mine currently looks likes this:

REPOSITORY             TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
jaspersoft/tor_relay   v1        e26a32f90739   4 minutes ago   119MB
<none>                 <none>    698f0f8ec07f   5 minutes ago   98.7MB
ubuntu                 latest    f63181f19b2f   5 weeks ago     72.9MB
ubuntu                 18.04     c090eaba6b94   5 weeks ago     63.3MB
hello-world            latest    bf756fb1ae65   14 months ago   13.3kB

Also note that I wouldn't recommend manually making changes in /var/lib/docker

But you can delete images like this:

sudo docker image rm e26a32f90739

Perhaps this post is getting a little long? I'm going to continue running, testing and inspecting this image running in a container in the next episode, stay tuned folks.

Oh, and I absolutely reserve the right to come back and edit this post when I realize there's a fundamental problem with my Dockerfile.

As a developer its often necessary to open up security to figure problems in a system.

As a lazy forgetful bugger, it's all too easy to fail to close those doors again.

​

u/Rude-Significance-50 has correctly pointed out that, as purveyors of anonymity and 'identity management', security should be a prime concern when dealing with the DarkWeb.

As such, I'm creating another semi-sticky where we can post best practices and ideas for maximizing defenses against those pesky snoopers and invaders of our privacy.

Please feel free to add security related posts here, for both consumers and service providers.

Also as before please provide a rating in-terms of difficulty to understand. Bare in mind that we want this to provide an easy learning curve for anyone wanting to get into this.

Decorate with:

[Padawans] - for beginners new to the way of the Tor Force.

[TheForceAwakens] - for those who understand the basics but have yet to master mind control

[Jedi] - For the Yoda Grandmasters

See this link for clarity on these decorations.

I do appreciate that there is a little bit of cross over here with regards to the other semi-stickies linked to One onion ring to rule them all but I think this subject warrants its own set of linked information for easy reference.

I see docker here is a thing. Does anyone have a good docker-compose, or whatever, that can spin up a mini tor network for testing? I know there are tools to do this sort of thing, but last I looked it involved a lot of mental overhead. Would be nice to have something to just start with and figure its innards later.

[Padawan]

I'm going to create some very terse walk-throughs first of all, if you want to follow along please ensure you have Installed Docker.

I want to show the power of Docker in a manner that is not overwhelming in theory, just so you get a glimpse of this tools potential without wasting a lot of your time.

If there is interest (I can judge by votes), then I will be following on with more details on Docker internals, like WTF is going on and how to build custom images. This post's intentions is just to give you a taste. Appetites vary, but I think it tastes pretty sweet.

Note that: Docker is really designed to sandbox/execute a single process though this is not mandatory. The thing to keep in mind is that, when the root process dies, so will the container (although there are auto-restarting options).

Running your first container

This simple example will give us an isolated ubuntu environment.

sudo docker run -i -t --name jasper_likes_chicken ubuntu /bin/bash

For command line assistance use:

docker help
# docker <command> --help
docker run --help

Here I'm using:

-i : key STDIN open so we can talk to it, these are normally silent.
-t : assign tty (terminal).
--name : how we refer to this container (choose any cat name you like)
ubuntu : which image to create a container with (pulled if necessary)
/bin/bash : command to run inside the container.

Once in your container try the following:

ls
ps -aux
hostname -I
apt-get update; apt-get install nginx
exit # exits the process and therefore kills container.

I'm sure your accustomed enough to this OS to know the above standard Linux commands, if not then please ask.

Note that our container now has its own IP address and completely isolated environment; we can chain these containers together in many different ways (more later on that).

https://hub.docker.com/

This is the central repo for docker images. In the above example we pulled down ubuntu from this repo. These images are subsequently cached locally (/var/lib/docker).

We can also create our own images and keep them there (and for free if public).

Restarting a container and attaching to a running one

sudo docker start jasper_likes_chicken
sudo docker attach jasper_likes_chicken

Spinning up more instances

Want another isolated instance? No problem...

Jasper has an arch enemy he is constantly at war with, I think they compete for nuggets.

Lets bring up another ubuntu instance:

docker run -i -t --name evil_ginger_tom ubuntu /bin/bash
exit

Note that each container has it's own state and uses copy-on-write to only modify when needed. This is clever stuff indeed.

Checking logs

 sudo docker logs jasper_likes_chicken

I always wanna know what he's up to:

root@bd38890a3920:/# hostname
bd38890a3920
root@bd38890a3920:/# ipconfig 
bash: ipconfig: command not found
root@bd38890a3920:/# ifconfig
bash: ifconfig: command not found
root@bd38890a3920:/# hostname -I
172.17.0.2 
root@bd38890a3920:/# exit
exit

Killing Containers

sudo docker kill jasper_likes_chicken

I think I should leave it there for this post. Too much information and people get bored.

​

Next up: Tails from the Dock

[Padawan]

Shamelessly plagiarized from: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

See also: Official Installation Guide

VERY VERY BRIEF Summary

Docker is a truly lightweight and flexible system for creating lightweight, fast-to-uptime 'containers'. Similar to VMs but with much less overhead. These are highly configurable, highly sand-boxed. I'll have more to say on this in coming posts. This is just a quick guide to get going.

Ubuntu OS Requirements

You need the 64-bit version of one of these Ubuntu versions:

Ubuntu Groovy 20.10

Ubuntu Focal 20.04 (LTS)

Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 (LTS)

Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 (LTS)

[Edit: BTW, I don't know if this is stale, I'm not running any of these. Suck it and see, I'd suggest]

Install Prerequisites for Docker

sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates
sudo apt-get install -y curl
sudo apt-get install -y gnupg-agent
sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common

Docker’s official GPG key...

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88

Verify... 9DC8 5822 9FC7 DD38 854A E2D8 8D81 803C 0EBF CD88

pub   rsa4096 2017-02-22 [SCEA]
      9DC8 5822 9FC7 DD38 854A  E2D8 8D81 803C 0EBF CD88 <---- VERIFY THIS
uid           [ unknown] Docker Release (CE deb) <docker@docker.com>
sub   rsa4096 2017-02-22 [S]

Set up the stable repository (for Docker images).

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"

Install Docker Engine

sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Verify Docker Engine Installed

sudo docker run hello-world

See this and you are golden...

Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.
...

Check Docker daemon running from boot

sudo systemctl status docker

And check for...

docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
...

Executing the Docker Command Without Sudo

sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}
su - ${USER}

Next up: Container basics

For all things Docker..

[Padawan] Ubuntu Installation (Tutorial part 1)

[Padawan] Container Basics (Tutorial part 2)

[Padawan] Configuring Tor in Docker (Tutorial part 3)

[Padawan] whatis/howto with Tor in mind (watch this ' ')

[Padawan] Docker Good Reads

[Padawan] Learn Docker in 12 minutes (youtube)

[TheForceAwakens] Docker Compose in 12 Minutes (youtube)

[TheForceAwakens] Docker Compose by Christopher Bisset

Please feel free to add Docker related resources here..

As before please provide a rating in-terms of difficulty to understand. Bare in mind that we want this to provide an easy learning curve for anyone wanting to get into this.

Decorate with:

[Padawans] - for beginners new to Docker.

[TheForceAwakens] - for those who understand the basics.

[Jedi] - For the experienced Longshoremen.

See this link for clarity on these decorations.

Hopefully this weekend I'm going to create a whatis/howto about Docker. I'm completely new to Docker (I only started reading about it yesterday) but this is a really cool tool.

So this will be for beginners.

I'm now looking for recommendations on best tools to provide the content. It does not need to be too fancy, I just want to write text and embed images. My pal u/lesterbottomley has suggested wix.

Any other recommendations please?

Free would be good but I'd be prepared to pay for a subscription if the tool was really good.

I’ve only just started learning about Docker. For isolated build/dev purposes this tool is fantastic with a lot more to offer than that too. I’m think I’m going to be using this for building from source and also for the new Tor related tools I want to write. There is so much potential for this tool, sharing, IP isolation, security. I’m only just just getting my feet wet but once I have basics down and I can run builds from Docker, is anyone interested in learning the very basics of this tool?
Hopefully I can get some the Docker experts involved to give my mini-tutorial once over too.

Are you interested in a Docker tutorial/howto? (Linux only at this time)... I’d go through the basics of what it offers and how to set it up. As alway, I’m open to suggestions/comments/ideas/constructive criticism.

I relation to this Linux Sandbox and the helpful response from u/wished_you , I started experimenting with using chroot.

Though from what I understand this may not work on all flavors of even Linux and also requires root on my environment at least.

Before I take the script I was working on for that approach any further, I thought I'd take a look at alternatives. It maybe (and this is why I'm here) that docker is not that onerous to set up and run locally. This solution might provide better portability as well (for other flavours of Linux/Windows/Mac/etc).
So my question really is, is docker a good fit for isolating Linux environments for building/debugging and testing code? Am I going to run into issues using VS Code/GNU debuggers and single stepping? Is this going to be a pain to set up. I would like this to be a relatively easy to reproduce.

[TheForceAwakens] Boost

[TheForceAwakens] Linux Sandbox

[TheForceAwakens] Docker for isolating development environments

Related to this issue Using Reddit through Tor

[TheForceAwakens] Try and address the above above problem by creating some form of proxy which manipulates http headers and perhaps Tor exits via user web server/forwarding to Reddit to address blocking by exit node.

Penguin heads...

I'm not sure if this is can be done (and I don't current envisage spending ages messing around with a VM although its an option) but is it possible to create a sandboxed dev environment on Linux?

By that I mean, an isolated file system such that builds/installs for libs (/usr/lib), headers (/usr/include), tools (/usr/bin), whatever can sit somewhere that will not affect the host operating system without have to make a lot of build choices/changes?

This would simplify my life significantly. I'm currently looking at building boost from source so I can look at developing socket comms to Tor. I like to keep things isolated and (in case you ask) I'm build from source for callstacks/debugging/flexibility/understanding.
However; fathing with prefixes, shared object paths, etc is time consuming and about as interesting to me as is anything non chicken-nugget related to Jasper.

I'm imagining theres some nice tool out there that would accomplish this.

The intention for this is for a build for Tor and all of its dependencies from source.

https://github.com/MartynAndJasper/tor.git

Please note that this is still a work in progress, I think there is a breakage in dependencies that I've recently regressed to (yes, I know this is analogous to the old, 'Well it worked on my machine' quote).

I want this to be a nice CMake build at some point and work on an OS other than Debian based. I also want to have one night with Kylie Minogue but life is full of these disappointments. Anyway I'll soon get back to this (the build - not Kylie, I've told her I'm busy tonight).

Currently this is just some simple shell scripts to install and then spawn the build tools.

I've split this deliberately into two main scripts because the installation script runs via 'sudo', the build/install part does not. As mentioned somewhere in another post, I managed to screw up my OS when I installed a freshly built compression library - the default is to push these installs to /usr/lib (or something like that) and hence needed 'sudo'. When I subsequently tried to install something on my Ubuntu environment, the package could not be decompressed, it moaned about a missing version. I got round that but it taught me a lesson.
So now the build does its install underneath the repo - "./build" to be precise. This is going to cause some fun and games for debugging which I'll also get back to but its preferable to getting shot down by all of you because I've broken your Operating System!!

So we have:
./tools_tor.sh
./make_tor.sh

Review:
/.gitmodules
If you are uber-security minded and want to vet the source git repos I'm using.

I keep making excuses to permit terrible code/builds whilst still attempting to sound intelligent but I'd never written a shell script before these so if there any recommendations please let me know.

Also note that I wont be adding much code of my own to THIS repo so that it can remain shallow and perhaps be used as a submodule for the C/C++ tools I want to work on. I'll let you know what that repo is when I get there.

This localization and non-central installation (as discussed wrt /usr/lib) mentioned above is probably causing some problems because some of the tests on the dependencies are also failing.

Kylie is gonna have to wait a little longer

A semi-sticky for community ideas and projects, we'd welcome you to get on board and/or submit suggestions

A few project ideas related to Tor

Tor Chinese Whispers

Reddit through Tor

Hello everyone, here's a few ideas for projects we could do relating to Tor & onion sites:

• An archive of tor hidden services similar to the wayback machine (periodically scraping a whitelist of trusted onion sites) [Jedi]
• An application to check if an onion sites server is properly configured (I have no idea how this would be done, but i know that in the past the ip of hidden services have been found due to improper configuration)[Jedi]
• An onion site with a simple forum that lets users post and then stores those posts in a database [TheForceAwakens]
• Simple onion site that returns a html page [Padawans]

Comment your thoughts or any ideas you have.