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- Tor's (little) Firewall Helper specification
- Jacob Appelbaum
- 0. Preface
- This document describes issues faced by Tor users who are behind NAT devices
- and wish to share their resources with the rest of the Tor network. It also
- explains a possible solution for some NAT devices.
- 1. Overview
- Tor users often wish to relay traffic for the Tor network and their upstream
- firewall thwarts their attempted generosity. Automatic port forwarding
- configuration for many consumer NAT devices is often available with two common
- protocols NAT-PMP[0] and UPnP[1].
- 2. Implementation
- tor-fw-helper is a program that implements basic port forwarding requests; it
- may be used alone or called from Tor itself.
- 2.1 Output format
- When tor-fw-helper has completed the requested action successfully, it will
- report the following message to standard output:
- tor-fw-helper: SUCCESS
- If tor-fw-helper was unable to complete the requested action successfully, it
- will report the following message to standard error:
- tor-fw-helper: FAILURE
- All informational messages are printed to standard output; all error messages
- are printed to standard error. Messages other than SUCCESS and FAILURE
- may be printed by any compliant tor-fw-helper.
- 2.2 Output format stability
- The above SUCCESS and FAILURE messages are the only stable output formats
- provided by this specification. tor-fw-helper-spec compliant implementations
- must return SUCCESS or FAILURE as defined above.
- 3. Security Concerns
- It is probably best to hand configure port forwarding and in the process, we
- suggest disabling NAT-PMP and/or UPnP. This is of course absolutely confusing
- to users and so we support automatic, non-authenticated NAT port mapping
- protocols with compliant tor-fw-helper applications.
- NAT should not be considered a security boundary. NAT-PMP and UPnP are hacks
- to deal with the shortcomings of user education about TCP/IP, IPv4 shortages,
- and of course, NAT devices that suffer from horrible user interface design.
- [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol
- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Plug_and_Play
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