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Connectivity

Cwtch makes use of Tor Onion Services (v3) for all inter-node communication.

We provide the openprivacy/connectivity package for managing the Tor daemon and setting up and tearing down onion services through Tor.

Known Risks​

Private Key Exposure to the Tor Process​

Status: Partially Mitigated (Requires Physical Access or Privilege Escalation to exploit)

We must pass the private key of any onion service we wish to set up to the connectivity library, through the Listen interface (and thus to the Tor process). This is one of the most critical areas that is outside of our control. Any binding to a rouge tor process or binary will result in compromise of the Onion private key.

Mitigations​

Connectivity attempt to bind to the system-provided Tor process as the default, only when it has been provided with an authentication token.

Otherwise connectivity always attempts to deploy its own Tor process using a known good binary packaged with the system (outside of the scope of the connectivity package)

In the long term we hope an integrated library will become available and allow direct management through an in-process interface to prevent the private key from leaving the process boundary (or other alternative paths that allow us to maintain full control over the private key in-memory.)

Tor Process Management​

Status: Partially Mitigated (Requires Physical Access or Privilege Escalation to exploit)

Many issues can arise from the management of a separate process, including the need to restart, exit and otherwise ensure appropriate management.

The ACN interface provides Restart, Close and GetBootstrapStatus interfaces to allow applications to manage the underlying Tor process. In addition the SetStatusCallback method can be used to allow an application to be notified when the status of the Tor process changes.

However, if sufficiently-privileged users wish they can interfere with this mechanism, and as such the Tor process is a more brittle component interaction than others.

Testing Status​

Current connectivity has limited unit testing capabilities and none of these are run during pull requests or merges. There is no integration testing.

It is worth noting that connectivity is used by both Tapir and Cwtch in their integration tests (and so despite the lack of package level testing, it is exposed to system-wide test conditions)