Tor Hackweek Project: Prototype network-namespace-based torsocks¶
Summary: Use network namespaces (or maybe something else?) to run target software in an environment where it can't talk to the real network; it can only talk to the tor socks port and/or some "shim" adapter. Might be able to remove or lessen dependence on LD_PRELOAD (which isn't available everywhere, can be "escaped", and can be a bit fragile). If we continued to use LD_PRELOAD could at least be used to prevent accidental connections to the real network.
Skills: C, familiarity with network namespaces and/or LD_PRELOAD would be helpful. New code could potentially be written in Rust.
Team¶
- jnewsome
- dgoulet
- boklm boklm/torsocks-netns
Where to meet¶
irc initially (jnewsome)
Problems to address¶
- Can't be completely confident that LD_PRELOAD intercepts all network requests.
- LD_PRELOAD can cause surprising breakages
- (Maybe) DNS leaks
Solutions to explore¶
- Network namespaces: Put target process(es) in a network namespace that can only talk to torsocks, getting ?higher confidence that there are no leaks. Stretch: create a synthetic network adapter that talks to tor, so we don't need to use LD_PRELOAD at all.
- SECCOMP: Create a seccomp filter that prevents network-related syscalls that don't originate from the LD_PRELOADd shim, getting higher confidence that there are no leaks. Stretch: use ptrace to rewrite network-related syscalls instead of using LD_PRELOAD.
Alternative/fallback¶
- Go through torsocks issues and increment/fix what we can through incremental improvements and cut a release. link to issue
Relevant issues¶
- FR to disable network: issues-26889. This mentions that
firejail
could be used for this. Looking at the man page for firejail,--protocol=unix
seems like it'd do what we want. - irssi: issues-11727. I'd thought there was a DNS leak, but maybe I misremembered. It looks like the issue is each process getting its own onion-address-resolution-table + irssi using multiple processes.
- torsocks support for unix sockets: issues-14132. (This would be let us disable net access completely)
Notes¶
- tor notes for how to set up a transparent proxy: TransparentProxy
- Maybe we could write a wrapper script to set up a network namespace, configure all traffic in that ns to go through the transparent proxy, and then run the target program(s) in the namespace?
Results¶
- torsocks-netns: torsocks-netns
- Wrapper for torsocks that protects against inadvertent leaks.
- Puts torsocks + application in an empty network namespace and "smuggles" out to the tor socks port over a unix-pipe tunnel.
- No root or priveleges required!
- Proofs of concept without torsocks/LD_PRELOAD:
- Network namespace with ip tables rules + proxy (implemented via redsocks) to funnel everything to either tor's socks port or tor's DNS port. (Root/privelege required?)
- Tried using tor's transparent proxy functionality + iptables rules in a network namespace, but couldn't get it working. Creating a bridged adapter requires ~root. (Could use a priveleged binary like firejail if installed. firejail's default config doesn't allow it, though)
- Proof of concept using tor's shared onion pool (to address issues-11727, fixing torsocks+irssi)
- torsocks handles resolving onion addresses using "onion cookies"
- irssi uses different processes to resolve vs connect, so doesn't work
- tor now natively supports onion cookies
- Modified torsocks to use tor's native onion cookie support and successfully connected to an onion irc server
Questions/follow-ups from demo¶
- Jeremy: how does it compare to orjail
- Jeremy: stream isolation in these modes? (-i with torsocks)
- Matt: (torsocks.conf supports 'AllowOutboundLocalhost 0|1|2')
- Nick: Tor always returns its local addresses from a given range specified in VirtualAddrNetworkIPv[46] , so you could in theory detect them like that. defaults are 127.192.0.0/10 and [FE80::]/10