The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name
RFC 7686
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) J. Appelbaum
Request for Comments: 7686 The Tor Project, Inc.
Category: Standards Track A. Muffett
ISSN: 2070-1721 Facebook
October 2015
The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name
Abstract
This document registers the ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name.
Status of This Memo
This is an Internet Standards Track document.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on
Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7686.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Appelbaum & Muffett Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 7686 .onion October 2015
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Introduction
The Tor network [Dingledine2004] has the ability to host network
services using the ".onion" Special-Use Top-Level Domain Name. Such
names can be used as other domain names would be (e.g., in URLs
[RFC3986]), but instead of using the DNS infrastructure, .onion names
functionally correspond to the identity of a given service, thereby
combining location and authentication.
.onion names are used to provide access to end to end encrypted,
secure, anonymized services; that is, the identity and location of
the server is obscured from the client. The location of the client
is obscured from the server. The identity of the client may or may
not be disclosed through an optional cryptographic authentication
process.
.onion names are self-authenticating, in that they are derived from
the cryptographic keys used by the server in a client-verifiable
manner during connection establishment. As a result, the
cryptographic label component of a .onion name is not intended to be
human-meaningful.
The Tor network is designed to not be subject to any central
controlling authorities with regards to routing and service
publication, so .onion names cannot be registered, assigned,
transferred or revoked. "Ownership" of a .onion name is derived
solely from control of a public/private key pair that corresponds to
the algorithmic derivation of the name.
In this way, .onion names are "special" in the sense defined by
Section 3 of [RFC6761]; they require hardware and software
implementations to change their handling in order to achieve the
desired properties of the name (see Section 4). These differences
are listed in Section 2.
Appelbaum & Muffett Standards Track [Page 2]
RFC 7686 .onion October 2015
Like Top-Level Domain Names, .onion names can have an arbitrary
number of subdomain components. This information is not meaningful
to the Tor protocol, but can be used in application protocols like
HTTP [RFC7230].
Note that .onion names are required to conform with DNS name syntax
(as defined in Section 3.5 of [RFC1034] and Section 2.1 of
[RFC1123]), as they will still be exposed to DNS implementations.
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