Secure Tor Hosting — Maximum Protection for .onion Services

Our secure Tor hosting implements security at every layer of the stack. At the hardware layer, ECC RAM detects and corrects memory errors that could be exploited. At the storage layer, LUKS full-disk encryption with keys held only in RAM ensures data-at-rest protection. At the OS layer, a hardened kernel with grsecurity patches reduces the attack surface of the kernel itself.

Mandatory access controls using AppArmor confine every process to its minimum required permissions. The Tor process can only read its configuration and write to its data directory. The web server can only access the document root. Database processes can only access their data files. Even if an attacker exploits a vulnerability in one service, the mandatory access controls prevent lateral movement.

Network security follows a zero-trust model. Every service runs in its own network namespace with firewall rules that allow only explicitly defined connections. The web server can connect to the application backend. The application can connect to the database. Nothing else is permitted. This micro-segmentation limits the blast radius of any single compromise to just the compromised service.

AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) monitors the integrity of all system files, binaries, libraries, and configurations. Any unauthorized modification triggers an immediate alert to our security team. We baseline the system after every authorized change, so our detection has zero tolerance for unexpected modifications.

Runtime security monitoring uses auditd to log security-relevant system calls: file access to sensitive paths, privilege escalation attempts, network connection creation, and kernel module loading. These audit logs are streamed to a separate logging server in real time, ensuring that an attacker who compromises the monitored server cannot tamper with the audit trail.

Our incident response process for secure hosting customers is accelerated. Security alerts are investigated within 15 minutes during business hours and within one hour outside business hours. If a compromise is confirmed, we immediately isolate the affected server, preserve forensic evidence, and begin remediation. You receive real-time updates through your encrypted communication channel throughout the process.

Beyond general server hardening, our secure Tor hosting implements Tor-specific protections against deanonymization attacks. Vanguards are enabled with three layers of guard relays that rotate on staggered schedules, protecting against guard discovery attacks that attempt to identify the Tor relay your server connects through.

We configure connection padding to generate constant-rate encrypted traffic between your server and its guard relay, making traffic analysis attacks significantly harder. An adversary monitoring your guard relay cannot determine when your hidden service is active or idle based on traffic volume alone.

For the highest security requirements, we offer single-hop Tor configurations where your server acts as its own relay, and split-key onion services where the private key is distributed across multiple servers using threshold cryptography. These advanced configurations provide additional protection against targeted attacks at the cost of some operational complexity.

Organizations with compliance requirements can use our secure Tor hosting while meeting their security obligations. We provide documentation of our security controls mapped to common frameworks including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and NIST 800-53. Our hardening baseline is auditable and reproducible, making it straightforward to demonstrate compliance to assessors.

We support customer-initiated penetration testing against your .onion service. Coordinate testing windows with our team, and we will ensure monitoring systems do not interfere with your assessment while still protecting the underlying infrastructure. Test results can be shared with our team for remediation if vulnerabilities are found in the hosting layer.

Quarterly security reports are provided for all secure hosting customers. These reports detail security events, patching activities, configuration changes, and audit findings from the period. They serve as evidence of ongoing security management for compliance purposes and give you visibility into the security posture of your hosting infrastructure.