We, the Debian project and the Tor project are enabling Tor onion services for several of our sites. These sites can now be reached without leaving the Tor network, providing a new option for securely connecting to resources provided by Debian and Tor.

The freedom to use open source software may be compromised when access to that software is monitored, logged, limited, prevented, or prohibited. As a community, we acknowledge that users should not feel that their every action is trackable or observable by others. Consequently, we are pleased to announce that we have started making several of the various web services provided by both Debian and Tor available via onion services.

While onion services can be used to conceal the network location of the machine providing the service, this is not the goal here. Instead, we employ onion services because they provide end-to-end integrity and confidentiality, and they authenticate the onion service end point.

For instance, when users connect to the onion service running at http://sejnfjrq6szgca7v.onion/, using a Tor-enabled browser such as the TorBrowser, they can be certain that their connection to the Debian website cannot be read or modified by third parties, and that the website that they are visiting is indeed the Debian website. In a sense, this is similar to what using HTTPS provides. However, crucially, onion services do not rely on third-party certification authorities (CAs). Instead, the onion service name cryptographically authenticates its cryptographic key.

In addition to the Tor and Debian websites, the Debian FTP and the Debian Security archives are available from .onion addresses, enabling Debian users to update their systems using only Tor connections. With the apt-transport-tor package installed, the following entries can replace the normal debian mirror entries in the apt configuration file (/etc/apt/sources.list):

  deb  tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian          jessie            main
  deb  tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian          jessie-updates    main
  deb  tor+http://sgvtcaew4bxjd7ln.onion/debian-security jessie/updates    main

Likewise, Tor's Debian package repository is available from an onion service :

  deb tor+http://sdscoq7snqtznauu.onion/torproject.org   jessie    main

Where appropriate, we provide services redundantly from several backend machines using OnionBalance. The Debian OnionBalance package is available from the Debian backports repository.

Lists of several other new onion services offered by Debian and Tor are available from https://onion.debian.org and https://onion.torproject.org respectively. We expect to expand these lists in the near future to cover even more of Debian's and Tor's services.