The Tor Project had released a timeline back in July 2020 of deprecating the Tor V2 Onion support/services (The Onion Router Version 3 services). This step has been taken to integrate the more secure version of Tor’s onion services called Version 3 or V3. The short encrypted services or the V2 services of Tor will not be functional by the 16tn of October 2021.
Abiding by the safety concerns, the Tor Project is replacing its V2 version with the secured V3 version, which is literally a forced transition. This statement has been proven as per one of The Onion Router talk message from David Goulet:
“Onion service v2 uses RSA1024 and 80 bit SHA1 (truncated) addresses. It also still uses the TAP handshake which has been entirely removed from Tor for many years now except v2 services. Its simplistic directory system poses a variety of enumeration and location-prediction attacks that give HSDir relays too much power to enumerate or even block v2 services. Finally, v2 services are not being developed nor maintained anymore. Only the most severe security issues are being addressed.”
As mentioned in the blog post of The Onion Router Project, the encrypted servers had consumed years for this transition from Tor V2 Onion services to the latest V3 ones. Throughout these years, The Onion Router has also taken care of the secured infrastructure of the V3 encrypted services. However, this was not an easy task, and they had to anticipate difficulties.
As outlined by the Tor Project, the decision to shift from the Tor V2 Onion to the V3 services (V3S) makes a lot of sense from the security perspectives. Nevertheless, many of The Onion Router users have disagreed and argued in the announcement’s comment section focusing on the merits of the shift. One of the Tor Project’s users has written that the Tor Project had “misunderstood” the nature of the open-source software by prohibiting the The Onion Router users from utilizing the insecure and outdated software. Another user had responded to the commenter mentioned above. He explained how the users having such an outrageous mindset could still technically use V2S.
“…[Y]ou’re welcome to download the Tor source code and add v2 functionality back in, and you’ll be able to visit sites hosted by people who have done the same. No one is stopping you. If your favorite sites no longer host a v2 (with a patched Tor), then you’ll have to convince them to do so. If you can’t convince them, then, well, maybe v2 isn’t really so important after all.”
Commonly, it is also accepted that the Tor V2 Onion Support are objectively more aesthetically pleasing. The fact that persists is the latest The Onion Router Version V3 is unnecessarily taken as a horror that currently causes resistance.
However, the October kill date for Tor V2 Onion is just a few months away.
Source: DarknetLive
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