cretz

bine

Go2018–2021

cretz / bine

bine

Go library for accessing and embedding Tor clients and servers

AI & Machine Learning Systems & Infrastructure Libraries & SDKs

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2Distinct people

20Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

826GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Go library for accessing and embedding Tor clients and servers

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year20 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-05-11 16:20:48 UTC to 2021-08-31 18:56:43 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	12	2	10
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	0	5
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3

What Hacker News says

20 sources

kodablah·Aug 31, 2021

Sure. I wrote https://github.com/cretz/bine (though I admittedly don't work on it much these days). I just have a few-line daemon that starts an HTTP (or gRPC or whatever) server on ephemeral onion service. Then I use that onion ID to access it (via TorBrowser or Orbot or a client built with the same library).

In Tor is a great sysadmin tool (2020)

kodablah·Aug 9, 2021

> Or a self-hosted option where the API could be deployed to the company's cloud of choice? Can put it on Tor and give an ephemeral onion link (I wrote https://github.com/cretz/bine to help w/ just these use cases). So people could access via Tor browser or via the same CLI with a "client"/"get" command. Can even have the ephemeral server determine its been HTTP "GET"d and kill itself. Then you don't even need a public website.

In Show HN: Ots – share a secret via one-time URL

kodablah·Jun 26, 2021

Shameless plug, I also wrote a simple lib that makes onion services easy: https://github.com/cretz/bine (OP's project uses a fork of it and I plan on putting more time into it soon)

In Cwtch: Decentralized, privacy-preserving, multi-party messaging protocol

kodablah·Oct 15, 2019

Shameless plug (that I haven't had much time to work on lately), you can also programmatically do similar in a few lines of Go: https://github.com/cretz/bine

In OnionShare makes it easy to publish anonymous, uncensorable websites

kodablah·Oct 10, 2019

> A good way to host the site would be to put it on a Tor onion service [...] If you know how to help set this up please get in touch. This is not very difficult. The Tor website explains it pretty clearly [0]. Alternatively since y'all are familiar with Go, there is a library [1] that makes listening on an onion address almost as easy as a regular address. 0 - https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.... 1 - https://github.com/cretz/bine

In What’s going on with WhatFreeWords?

kodablah·Sep 23, 2019

> IIRC someone already made site which generates unlimited links to v3 addresses (without having them lead to anywhere, of course) V3 addresses are just ed25519 pub keys and a couple byte changes. You can use Go libraries like Bine [0] to generate as many V3 (or V2) addresses as you want from keys. 0 - https://godoc.org/github.com/cretz/bine/torutil#OnionService...

In Building a Dark Web Crawler in Go

kodablah·Feb 20, 2019

For those looking to do this programmatically, it is so easy these days. This project uses the Python library Stem [0] and I wrote one for Go called Bine [1]. Firing up a website on an onion service from your home computer is really easy, and busts NAT by its nature. 0 - https://stem.torproject.org/ 1 - https://github.com/cretz/bine

In OnionShare 2 adds anonymous dropboxes

kodablah·Jan 13, 2019

In very early stages (like too early to know what's going on or why I'm taking certain approaches). However, I have built a couple libraries I leverage. There is a Tor embedder/controller [0] (with a project assisting with statically linked Tor [1]) and there is a Go wrapper for locally encrypted Sqlite [2] (which I need to update). That Tor controller even has a gRPC example that shows the basic idea of starting an onion service and communicating over Tor. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/bine 1 - https://github.com/cretz/tor-static 2 - https://github.com/cretz/go-sqleet

In Ricochet-IM: Anonymous, decentralized, metadata-resistant instant messaging

kodablah·Nov 22, 2018

For anyone curious, v3 is the 32-byte ed25519 pub key, then the first two bytes of the SHA3-256 hash of the key (w/ prepended fixed string and one byte appended), then one more const byte, and then all of those 35 bytes are base 32'd to make 56 chars. Some Go code to illustrate: https://github.com/cretz/bine/blob/f33268f0843a1b2b131a4cacf.... One benefit being that the entire pub key is right there in the hostname.

kodablah·Nov 21, 2018

Onion (née hidden) services are easily hosted from any computer, even behind a NAT/ISP due to how it publishes its descriptor and relies on reachable relays for rendezvous. It's easy with the Tor executable and a torrc file, there are plenty of guides out there. Even though you're new to all this, for others wanting to do this programmatically, there is Stem for Python and I've written one for Go [0]. It's such an easy self-hosting NAT traversal technique, I'm surprised it's not used more often in situations not requiring great bandwidth/latency (e.g. p2p chat). 0 - https://github.com/cretz/bine

kodablah·Oct 4, 2018

Tempted to make a version of this myself because it's simple. Single file executable, with statically linked Tor, that starts a v3 onion service (with or without client auth), hosts web server with file at URL, gives onion address URL (and client auth if any, could include the as part of URL or URL fragment or whatever depending upon approach desired). Client can use exe or Tor Browser to download it. Could add any features you want such as killing the server after first download, deadlines, etc. Pro: doesn't upload to server and preserves anonymity. Con: slower than non-anonymous. Here's a simple code example of a v2 onion file server using external Tor process w/ no auth: https://github.com/cretz/bine#example. This is essentially what onionshare does: https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare.

In Show HN: CryptSend.io – Share encrypted files with randomly generated links

kodablah·Sep 20, 2018

This is a good feature. Still, appears you are hitting Cloudflare first via an exit. I would say if whatever service you are using has its own onion, use that instead. I assume the way Cloudflare is determining if I am using Tor is by doing an IP lookup match w/ known exits? I would expect this feature would reduce bandwidth on the exit nodes which is great for decentralization. However, if you weren't to trust Cloudflare, this could be bad as its now opening up a central company to route traffic for Cloudflare customers, making it a central location for traffic analysis attacks (again, if you don't trust Cloudflare). At least exit nodes are a bit more distributed (but not much as there are still a very limited number, and you have to trust them too). Also, since OnionBalance doesn't support v3 services yet, what is Cloudflare using behin

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d those onion services to make them HA? Or are they each running on single machines acting as gateways that load balance after that? Also, count me as one of those people that don't see much value DV certs have for onion services. A v3 onion is itself proof you have the ed25519 private key, so DV adds little on an identity and encryption front. EV has extra identity verification of course. I've read the EFF mailing list post in justification, and I'd say if features of TLS are a requirement (e.g. benefits of HTTPS), you might as well allow self-signed certs instead of having people use a CA. Granted, it's fairly harmless to allow DV for onion services, I just don't want to see it become the norm for HTTP-based onion services via promotion of the concept. Shameless plug, here's a toolkit to create your own onion services easily in just a few lines: https://github.com/cretz/bine (including non-anonymous mode like the CF onion services). You can fire one up for your own site and give it as an HTTP alt svc.

In Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service

eadmund·Sep 11, 2018Submission

Bine, a Go API for Tor

1 points · Open discussion

kodablah·Sep 11, 2018

Yup. Here's a few Go lines to serve a dir over http via an onion service: https://github.com/cretz/bine#example. Takes a few seconds to setup the service or even less if you set the option to use v3 onion services. Client auth can be configured and it's part of the protocol. Fire it up and serve your at-home photo catalog and view it via something like Orfox on your mobile device.

In Exploit vendor drops Tor Browser zero-day on Twitter

kodablah·Aug 7, 2018

You and I must have like minds. I have even created an anon DHT PoC [0], conceptualized how the messaging might work [1], made a lib to use Tor easier since it's the best anon nat buster these days [2], began toying with a superset of reddit/slack/forums/etc (some grpc files at [3] and some impl in that same repo), and a bunch of other small things in order to arrive at this final destination. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/tor-dht-poc 1 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/6 2 - https://github.com/cretz/bine 3 - https://github.com/cretz/yukup/tree/master/yukup/pb/proto

In Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

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