More Tor .Onion Sites May Get Digital Certificates Soon

Trailrunner7 writes News broke last week that Facebook had built a hidden services version of its social network available to users browsing anonymously via the Tor Project's proxy service. Unlike any .onion domain before it, Facebook's would be verified by a legitimate digital signature, signed and issued by DigiCert. Late yesterday, Jeremy Rowley, DigiCert's vice president of business development and legal, explained his company's decision to support this endeavor in a blog entry. He also noted that DigiCert is considering opening up its certification business to other .Onion domains in the future. "Using a digital certificate from DigiCert, Tor users are able to identify the exact .onion address operated by Facebook," Rowley explained. "Tor users can evaluate the digital certificate contents to discover that the entity operating the onion address is the same entity as the one operating facebook.com."

Comments

Re:Why not use Verizon as your ISP as well

[Crashmarik]

If you are worried about your government persecuting you Facebook is not the place to hangout. If you want to get your message out to social media get a friend in a less repressive country to post on your behalf. Posting on facebook from someplace like Syria or No Korea would be tantamount to signing your own death warrant.

That's fucking stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The protocol itself cryptographically ensures that you're talking to the same service every time. That's why .onion addresses look funny: The cost of choosing parts of the name grows exponentially with the number of characters you want to choose. Taking over an .onion domain requires "choosing" the entire name, and that's impossible (infeasible to the point of impossibility).

Using a certificate hierarchy with TOR can only do one thing: Expose you.