Landmark for Hidden Services: .onion names reserved by the IETF

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body that sets standards for the Internet, has formally recognized .onion names. We think that this is a small and important landmark in the movement to build privacy into the structure of the Internet. This standardization work for .onion is joint work between Facebook and the Tor Project amongst others in an effort to help secure users everywhere.

Over the last few years, The Tor Project has been working with other members of the Peer to Peer community led by Dr. Christian Grothoff, founder of the GNUnet project to register several Special-Use Domain Names. IETF name reservations are part of a lesser known process that ensures a registered Special-Use Domain Name will not become a Top Level Domain (TLD) to be sold by the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Special-Use Domain Names have special considerations documented as part of their registration. Some of these names may sound familiar, such as .local which is widely deployed by Apple and others for Multicast Domain Name Service (mDNS).

During our long journey which began in the Summer of Snowden, Alec Muffett and I were encouraged to split out .onion from the list of other peer to peer names and to make a separate draft to register .onion as a Special-Use Domain Name. In this draft we listed security and privacy considerations that we believe will help to protect end users from targeted and mass-surveillance. We're happy to say that the first name reservation was just published as RFC7686.

Our internet standard reflects on considerations for handling .onion names on the internet as well as officially reserving .onion as a Special-Use-Domain-Name with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). With this registration, it is should also be possible to buy Extended Validation (EV) SSL/TLS certificates for .onion services thanks to a recent decision by the Certification Authority Browser Forum. We hope that in the future we'll see easy to issue certificates from the Let's Encrypt project for .onion services. We also hope to see more Peer to Peer names such as .gnu registered as Special-Use-Domain-Names by the IETF.

It is now easier than ever to deploy, share and use Tor Hidden Services.

We greatly enjoyed our efforts with the IETF and plan to continue actively participate with the IETF in the future. We'd also like to thank everyone who helped with this process including but not limited to Mark Nottingham, Roger Dingledine, Linus Nordberg, Seth David Schoen, Leif Ryge, Helekin Wolf, Matthias Wachs and Dr. Christian Grothoff.