What is the Onion URL Format?
Onion URL Format
If you’re an Internet security buff or are just interested in protecting your privacy, you’ve probably heard of onion sites. Onion sites use Tor, a special network that encrypts your connection to a website and hides your IP address and location. This helps prevent your sensitive information from being snooped on by someone monitoring your Tor exit nodes, which is the “last mile” of your Internet connection. If you want to browse a site without using Tor, you can use a proxy service that connects to Tor for you and then forwards your traffic over the regular Internet. However, this is a bad idea and will defeat the whole purpose of using an onion site.
Unlike ordinary domain names such as.com,.org, and.biz, which are registered with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), onion sites don’t have a central authority that controls them. Instead, they have a special domain suffix that ends in.onion and are only accessible via the Tor network.
When you visit an urls onion site, your computer sends your request to a Tor proxy server that then routes it through several more relay servers to reach the destination website. This process is called Tor circuits and makes it difficult for an adversary to snoop on your browsing activity.
What is the Onion URL Format?
Tor encrypts your connections to websites, which means it’s impossible for them to identify you. However, because it takes at least three hops for your data to travel from your computer to a website you’re visiting, there are still ways adversaries can spoof the website and intercept your private information. That’s why the best way to use an onion site is with Tor, which encrypts your connections, blocks trackers, and prevents browser fingerprinting.
Because a website can be hosted on any computer, it’s easy to set up a server and start serving its content through Tor. However, a server running a traditional HTTP site is vulnerable to SSL stripping attacks, which are when malicious Tor exit nodes remove the website’s certificate so they can snoop on your browser session. Onion sites can avoid these attacks by connecting to a Tor hidden service and hiding their servers behind it.
Onion URLs aren’t standard Web addresses, but a version of the v3.onion TLD format is widely used today. They’re opaque, non-mnemonic 56-character alpha-semi-numeric hashes that are randomly generated based on a public key when the hidden service is configured. The hashes are made up of any letter in the alphabet and decimal digits starting with 2 and ending with 7.
You can set your Tor browser to automatically prioritize the onion site version of a website by going into your settings and checking the option to always route to the onion site. You can also do this manually by opening the menu, clicking on Tor, and then selecting Preferences. In either case, it’s a good idea to periodically check your Tor browser’s settings to ensure you’re not missing any important features that can help keep you secure online.
