[Pkg-anonymity-tools] Bug#762890: Bug#762890: onionshare: use the default Tor control settings

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, 2014-09-26 at 06:33 +0000, Micah Lee wrote:

> Unfortunately OnionShare doesn't work with the system tor without
> changing a bunch of stuff around, due to limitations in tor. Instead
> it's recommended that you install Tor Browser Bundle (perhaps using the
> torbrowser-launcher Debian package) and run it before running OnionShare.

torbrowser-launcher is not working right now (#758935) so I can't do
that but it sounds like OnionShare needs moving to contrib if it relies
on torbrowser-launcher.

> When you connect to the control port, you start a hidden service by
> setting the values HiddenServiceDir and HiddenServicePort. The control
> port doesn't respond with the .onion address, which is an important
> thing to know. The only way to learn that is to look in HiddenServiceDir
> for a file called "hostname" and read its contents. If you're using a
> system tor, that file is only readable by the debian-tor user, which
> means an unprivileged user can't learn the .onion address.

My user is in the debian-tor group so it should be able to read that.

> Also (at least I believe) in the default Debian torrc file the control
> port isn't enabled. So users would have to edit their torrc before being
> able to use OnionShare.

The control socket is enabled, is the control port different to that?

> One potential option to help this problem would be to make tor a
> dependency of onionshare, and have OnionShare launch its own tor process
> (independent of the system tor process) for starting a hidden service.

That sounds like a reasonable idea to me.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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