Accessing Tor hidden services over a single hop circuit

Question

I will presage the expected warnings before posting my question: I fully understand the security risks involved using single hops, however, with regards to my goals I have zero need for anonymity.

I am interested in archiving the contents of several Tor hidden services e.g. discussion forums, and am not intent on doing anything that might demand privacy. As a consequence, my interest is having a high bandwidth connection to these websites, with no need to remain anonymous.

I understand that one may re-compile Tor to create single hop circuits e.g. How to decrease number of Tor hops?

I also understand that while one may wish to construct a single hop circuit, very few relays have the single hop exit option enabled.

My questions are two-fold.

1. Can Tor hidden services detect that a client is using just a single hop, and reject the connection? I have been advised by someone that this does occur, but I am unable to find anything that indicates that this indeed the case.

2. Is the below configuration possible?

• Re-compile Tor to allow for single hops.
• Using a second instance of Tor, create a relay allowing single hop exits.
• Configure the re-compiled Tor to use this exit relay

Answer 1

I think you want to check out the configure option for tor2web mode, which should do pretty much what you want. No special second instance running a tor relay would be necessary

Answer 2

Seconded on tor2web mode. When Tor 0.2.6.x comes out, see also:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12844

for even better performance.

You can specify in advance what machine you want to be the Rendezvous Point. So the idea would be that you have two Tor instances, one relay and one client. Within the client's torrc you set the relay to be the Rendezvous Point. This is roughly equivalent to setting the Rendezvous Point to be yourself