Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root: A measurement of Tor's .onion pseudo-TLD in the global domain name system

Abstract

The Tor project provides individuals with a mechanism of communicating anonymously on the Internet. Furthermore, Tor is capable of providing anonymity to servers, which are configured to receive inbound connections only through Tor---more commonly called hidden services. In order to route requests to these hidden services, a namespace is used to identify the resolution requests to such services. A namespace under a non-delegated (pseudo) top-level-domain (TLD) of .onion was elected. Although the Tor system was designed to prevent .onion requests from leaking into the global DNS resolution process, numerous requests are still observed in the global DNS. In this paper we will present the state of .onion requests received at the global public DNS A and J root nodes over a longitudinal period of time, a synthesis of Day In The Life of the Internet (DITL) data repository, and potential explanations of the leakage, and highlights of trends associated with global censorship events. By sharing this preliminary work, we wish to trigger further discussions on the matter in the community.