What is Ablative's Quad Hop?

QuadHop is mentioned several times on our website but we’ve never explained what QuadHop is.

If you are unfamiliar with how .onion services interact with rendezvous points and directories then it would be a good idea to check the Tor Project’s .onion service explainer first.

Most operators will run the Tor daemon on the same server as their service daemon (e.g. nginx) and may make mistakes that allow the server to expose the IP addresses on other interfaces, expose fingerprints (e.g. SSH keys) that can be crawled on the clearnet.

A QuadHop setup runs the Tor daemon on a server that has access to the Internet and a firewalled LAN. The service daemon resides on a server in the LAN. That server does not have public IP addresses, it cannot call out to the Internet, it is marooned.

                 PUBLIC                     UNROUTED 
                INTERNET                      LAN                    
+-------------+         +-----------------+           +------------+
| Tor Network | ------- | Quad Hop Server |---------- | Web Server |
+-------------+         +-----------------+           +------------+

The fourth hop in QuadHop is between the Tor bastion and the isolated server.

Ablative.Hosting runs on bare metal on our own ASN, there’s no risk of a cloud provider being able to sniff the traffic content between the Tor node and the service node.

Because QuadHop requires custom provisioning (server hardware, switch ports etc) it is neither cheap nor available as a turnkey / month-to-month offering.

If you’d like to know more please send an email to sales@ablative.hosting or drop by IRC; irc://hzwjmjimhr7bdmfv2doll4upibt5ojjmpo3pbp5ctwcg37n3hyk7qzid.onion:6667

What is Ablative’s Quad Hop?