Resurrecting Tor, continued

Following an embarrassingly long period of no Tor support, we recently blogged about resurrecting Tor.

As of today, Tor users can once more connect to freenode over Tor; the hidden service address is (updated Aug 2020, see footnote)

ajnvpgl6prmkb7yktvue6im5wiedlz2w32uhcwaamdiecdrfpwwgnlqd.onion

The hidden service requires SASL authentication, as before. In addition, due to the abuse that led Tor access to be disabled in the first place, we have unfortunately had to add another couple of restrictions:

• You must log in using SASL's EXTERNAL or ECDSA-NIST256P-CHALLENGE (more below)
• If you log out while connected via Tor, you will not be able to log in without reconnecting.

If you haven't set up the requisite SASL authentication, we recommend SASL EXTERNAL. You'll need to generate a client certificate:

openssl req -x509 -sha256 -new -newkey rsa:4096 -days 1000 -nodes -out freenode.pem -keyout freenode.pem

and consult your IRC client's documentation to find out how to use it to connect. Connect to freenode over TLS on the plain Internet and /msg NickServ CERT ADD to authorise it to your account.

You'll then want to tell your client to try the EXTERNAL mechanism. We lack comprehensive documentation for this, but it's a feature in most modern clients—check their docs for instructions for now.

It's currently not possible to register an account for use with Tor without connecting at least once over the Internet. We're investigating our options, and would like to provide a solution to this in the future.

(Aug 2020 footnote: the old address was freenodeok2gncmy.onion. We have deprecated this following the release of Tor HS v3 by upstream Tor, with v2 due to become deprecated in the network. )