As part of the #MoreOnionsPorFavor campaign, I decided to follow brave.com's lead and make my homepage available as a Tor onion service.

Tor daemon setup

I started by installing the Tor daemon locally:

apt install tor

and then setting the following in /etc/tor/torrc:

SocksPort 0
SocksPolicy reject *
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 [2600:3c04::f03c:91ff:fe8c:61ac]:80
HiddenServicePort 443 [2600:3c04::f03c:91ff:fe8c:61ac]:443
HiddenServiceVersion 3
HiddenServiceNonAnonymousMode 1
HiddenServiceSingleHopMode 1

in order to create a version 3 onion service without actually running a Tor relay.

Note that since I am making a public website available over Tor, I do not need the location of the website to be hidden and so I used the same settings as Cloudflare in their public Tor proxy.

Also, I explicitly used the external IPv6 address of my server in the configuration in order to prevent localhost bypasses.

After restarting the Tor daemon to reload the configuration file:

systemctl restart tor.service

I looked for the address of my onion service:

$ cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname 
ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion

Apache configuration

Next, I enabled a few required Apache modules:

a2enmod mpm_event
a2enmod http2
a2enmod headers

and configured my Apache vhosts in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/www.conf:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName fmarier.org
    ServerAlias ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion

    Protocols h2, http/1.1
    Header set Onion-Location "http://ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion%{REQUEST_URI}s"
    Header set alt-svc 'h2="ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion:443"; ma=315360000; persist=1'
    Header add Strict-Transport-Security: "max-age=63072000"

    Include /etc/fmarier-org/www-common.include

    SSLEngine On
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/fmarier.org/fullchain.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/fmarier.org/privkey.pem
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName fmarier.org
    Redirect permanent / https://fmarier.org/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion
    Include /etc/fmarier-org/www-common.include
</VirtualHost>

Note that /etc/fmarier-org/www-common.include contains all of the configuration options that are common to both the HTTP and the HTTPS sites (e.g. document root, caching headers, aliases, etc.).

Finally, I restarted Apache:

apache2ctl configtest
systemctl restart apache2.service

Testing

In order to test that my website is correctly available at its .onion address, I opened the following URLs in a Brave Tor window:

• http://ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion/
• https://ixrdj3iwwhkuau5tby5jh3a536a2rdhpbdbu6ldhng43r47kim7a3lid.onion/ (a TLS certificate error is expected)

I also checked that the main URL (https://fmarier.org/) exposes a working Onion-Location header which triggers the display of a button in the URL bar (recently merged and available in Brave Nightly):

Testing that the Alt-Svc is working required using the Tor Browser since that's not yet supported in Brave:

1. Open https://fmarier.org.
2. Wait 30 seconds.
3. Reload the page.

On the server side, I saw the following:

2a0b:f4c2:2::1 - - [14/Oct/2020:02:42:20 +0000] "GET / HTTP/2.0" 200 2696 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
2600:3c04::f03c:91ff:fe8c:61ac - - [14/Oct/2020:02:42:53 +0000] "GET / HTTP/2.0" 200 2696 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"

That first IP address is from a Tor exit node:

$ whois 2a0b:f4c2:2::1
...
inet6num:       2a0b:f4c2::/40
netname:        MK-TOR-EXIT
remarks:        -----------------------------------
remarks:        This network is used for Tor Exits.
remarks:        We do not have any logs at all.
remarks:        For more information please visit:
remarks:        https://www.torproject.org

which indicates that the first request was not using the .onion address.

The second IP address is the one for my server:

$ dig +short -x 2600:3c04::f03c:91ff:fe8c:61ac
hafnarfjordur.fmarier.org.

which indicates that the second request to Apache came from the Tor relay running on my server, hence using the .onion address.