tor-fw-helper-spec.txt

                          Tor's (little) Firewall Helper specification
                                      Jacob Appelbaum

0. Preface

 This document describes issues faced by Tor users who are behind NAT devices
 and wish to share their resources with the rest of the Tor network. It also
 explains a possible solution for some NAT devices.

1. Overview

 Tor users often wish to relay traffic for the Tor network and their upstream
 firewall thwarts their attempted generosity.  Automatic port forwarding
 configuration for many consumer NAT devices is often available with two common
 protocols NAT-PMP[0] and UPnP[1].

2. Implementation

 tor-fw-helper is a program that implements basic port forwarding requests; it
 may be used alone or called from Tor itself.

2.1. Output format

2.1.1. Motivation

 tor-fw-helper should be able to signal to tor whether its actions
 succeeded so that tor can act accordingly. For this reason it's
 important to standarize the output format of tor-fw-helper.

 tor-fw-helper outputs signalling commands to stdout, and debugging
 messages to stderr. This means that a program that launches
 tor-fw-helper only needs to monitor stdout to learn its status.

2.1.2. TCP forwarding output

 When tor-fw-helper completes a TCP forwarding action, it prints the
 following message to standard output:

    tor-fw-helper tcp-forwarding <external port> <internal port> <status> [<message>]

 where,

 <external port>, is the TCP port in the external side of the NAT
                  device that was forwarded.
 <internal port>, is the TCP port in the internal side of the NAT
                  device that accepts forwarded traffic.
 <status>, is either "SUCCESS" or "FAIL".
 <message>, is an optional supplementary message that can include
            multiple words.

 For example, upon successfully using NAT-PMP to forward connections from
 port '4200' to port '4333', tor-fw-helper would output in stdout:

    tor-fw-helper tcp-forwarding 4200 4333 SUCCESS NAT-PMP succeded

3. Security Concerns

 It is probably best to hand configure port forwarding and in the process, we
 suggest disabling NAT-PMP and/or UPnP. This is of course absolutely confusing
 to users and so we support automatic, non-authenticated NAT port mapping
 protocols with compliant tor-fw-helper applications.

 NAT should not be considered a security boundary. NAT-PMP and UPnP are hacks
 to deal with the shortcomings of user education about TCP/IP, IPv4 shortages,
 and of course, NAT devices that suffer from horrible user interface design.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Plug_and_Play