Hidden Services

Remark: Support for hidden services is new in Vidalia. You should expect it to have bugs, some of which possibly corrupting your hidden service configuration. So, don't rely on it, or rather, don't blame us if something goes wrong. If you find bugs or have comments on this new feature, please let us know! We need your feedback.

What is a hidden service?

Hidden services allow you to provide any kind of TCP-based service, e.g. an HTTP service, to others without revealing your IP address. The protocol to provide a hidden service is built on top of the same circuits that Tor uses for anonymous browsing and roughly has similar anonymity properties.

For more information on hidden service you may want to read section 5 of Tor's design paper (doc/design-paper/tor-design.pdf) or the Rendezvous Specification (doc/spec/rend-spec.txt).

How do I provide a hidden service?

Providing a hidden service consists of at least two steps:

Install a web server locally (or a server for whatever service you want to provide, e.g. IRC) to listen for local requests.
Configure your hidden service, so that Tor relays requests coming from Tor users to your local server.

There is a fine tutorial on the Tor website (https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html) that describes these steps in more detail.

What data do I need to provide?

The services table contains five columns containing data about configured hidden services:

Onion Address (generated): The service (or onion) address is generated by Tor to uniquely identify your service. Give this onion address to the people who shall be able to access your service. You may use the "Copy to clipboard" button for that to avoid typos. If you have just created a hidden service, the field says "[Created by Tor]"; in order to make it display the real onion address, you need to save your configuration and re-open the settings window.
Virtual Port (required): This is the TCP port that clients will need to know in order to access your service. Typically, you will want to use the service-specific port here, e.g. port 80 for HTTP. Note that the virtual port usually has nothing to do with firewall settings, because it is only used Tor-internally.
Target (optional): Usually you want Tor to relay connection requests to localhost on a different port than the one you specified in "Virtual Port". Therefore, you can specify a target consisting of physical address and port to which requests to your hidden service are redirected, e.g. to localhost:5222 (or on whatever port your server is listening). If you don't specify any target, Tor will redirect requests to the port specified in "Virtual Port" on localhost.
Service Directory (required): Tor needs to store some hidden-service specific files in a separate directory, e.g. a private key and a hostname file containing the onion address. This directory should be distinct from a directory containing content that the service provides. A good place for a service directory might be a sub directory in Tor's data directory. -- Note that you cannot change the directory of a running service (it wouldn't make much sense to allow it, because Vidalia is not supposed to move directories on your hard disk!). If you want to move a hidden service to another directory, please proceed as follows: Start by disabling the service in Vidalia and save the configuration. Then move the directory on your hard disk to the new place. Finally, change the directory in Vidalia to the new location, enable the service again, and save the new configuration.
Enabled: If this checkbox is disabled, Vidalia will not configure the given hidden service in Tor. This can be useful for keeping the configuration of a currently unused service for later use. All non-enabled services are stored in the Vidalia-specific configuration file vidalia.conf.

What are the five buttons used for?

Add service: Creates a new empty service configuration.
Remove service: Permanently removes a hidden service configuration. (If you want to temporarily remove a service, uncheck its Enabled checkbox.)
Copy to clipboard: Copies the onion address to the clipboard, so that you can tell it to whoever shall be able to use your service.
Browse: Lets you browse to find a local hidden service directory.

How can I configure advanced hidden service settings?

Tor allows configuration of more specific settings for hidden services, e.g. forcing to use (or avoiding) certain nodes as introduction points, or providing multiple virtual ports for the same service.

However, we decided to simplify things in Vidalia and provide only the most common settings. If you want to configure advanced settings, you need to do so in Tor's torrc file. Vidalia will not remove those settings even when you are editing your hidden services. If you specify more than one virtual port, only the first will be displayed and be editable.

How does Vidalia help me to access other hidden services?

Not at all. There is no need to do so. If you want to access another hidden service, type the service's onion address in your browser (or appropriate client application if it's not a web service), and Tor does the rest for you. There is no need to specifically configure Tor for that.