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Bug#895908: [apt-transport-tor] Invalid DNS SRV queries sent for _socks._tcp.localhost



Hi,

On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 02:24:42PM +0100, Kevin Steen wrote:
> Since the queries are invalid and the tor proxy address is configured in
> apt.conf, these queries shouldn't be generated.

The report gave me some headache as the queries aren't invalid. It seems
relatively unlikely that a user really does "redirection" of localhost
services via SRV, but its technically allowed, valid & not completely
unheard of ($searchengine e.g. easily finds instances for XMPP).

Its usually also not a problem as most people will have a caching DNS
server either right on their box (systemd-resolved for example) or on
their (trusted) network like their router – and those will resolve them
locally as they know perfectly well that a more upstream DNS server will
not have a better answer (rfc6761 defines that as a SHOULD).

Its "only" bad if you interact directly with a sufficiently evil DNS
server that answers the SRV with the address of an evil SOCKS proxy
– that would be very sad (but isn't that different to the problem with
DNS at large in this situation).


Anyway, the solution was way too obvious… instead of complex conditional
disabling of SRV and stuff we can just default to 127.0.0.1 instead of
localhost (which in perfect hindsight is obviously what most other tools
working with Tor do).

I have done that in src:apt (which for technical reasons is where this
part of apt-transport-tor lives), so our next major release (1.7) will
include that.

If you don't want to wait you can set the option yourself of course, but
note that due to an apt bug, apt will do a very pointless SRV query for
IP addresses… (fixed as well in the next release) which kinda defeats
the point. So you could also disable SRV queries – but that will effect
all queries (Acquire::EnableSrvRecords "false";).

[I will keep that bugreport open for the moment, so I can add
a paragraph about this to the README and apply a tighter
Recommends: apt (>= 1.7~something) then its released.]


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

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