OnionCat makes use of these hidden services. If Tor gets a request for such hostname it does not exit to the Internet but it looks up the service within the Tor network itself and connects the TCP session there.

Hidden services are addressed by special hostnames ending with the top level domain. connections do never exit to the Internet. HTTP servers) within the Tor network, i.e. Tor offers hidden services which are a feature to connect to TCP-based services (such as e.g. HIDDEN SERVICES AND THE GLUE BETWEEN ONIONCAT AND TOR But since OnionCat assigns IPv6 addresses with the prefix fd87:d87e:eb43::/48 to the tunnel interface, any point-to-point connection between two nodes will work out-of-the box. TCP, UDP, and ICMP) can pass through this tunnel as long as they are IPv6-based. Once a connection between two OnionCats is established, any network packets (such as e.g. There is no central server or any other instance which manages the network.īecause OnionCat connects through Tor, any traffic passing through OnionCat is protected from surveillance. The differences between OnionCat and any other VPN is that, firstly, OnionCat does not connect through the Internet but through Tor’s hidden services (or I2P’s), and, secondly, it uses a peer-to-peer approach.

This is what basically every VPN adapter (such as e.g. OnionCat is a VPN adapter which let’s you connect an arbitrary number of hosts together as if they were on the same network segment. This article is written in respect to version 0.4.6. OnionCat4 refers to the versions >= 0.4.x of OnionCat which is found on Github (). OnionCat4 comes with a distributed hosts database based on the DNS protocol which allows OnionCat nodes to dynamically exchange. This article gives on overview why the newer hidden services almost broke OnionCat and explains the adaptions that have been made with OnionCat4 to work as smooth as possible again even with the newer version 3 of hidden services. This had a severe impact on the functionality of OnionCat. Most importantly this is the replacement of Tor’s hidden services version 2 by the new hidden services version 3. Since the beginning of the development of OnionCat in 2008 a lot has changed.

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