onion-expose is a utility that allows one to easily create and control temporary Tor onion services.
onion-expose can be used for any sort of TCP traffic, from simple HTTP to Internet radio to Minecraft to SSH servers.
It can also be used to expose individual files and allow you to request them from another computer.
ngrok is nice. But it requires everything to go through a central authority (a potential security issue), and imposes
artificial restrictions, such as a limit of one TCP tunnel per user. It also doesn't allow you to expose files easily
(you have to set it up yourself).
For now, there's no setup.py script (working on it...)
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cd onionexpose
$ python main.py 8080
This will create a Tor onion service tunneling port 80 of the onion service to port 8080 locally.
$ python main.py /usr/share/dict/words
This will create a Tor onion service tunneling port 80 of the onion service to a simple HTTP server responding with
the content of /usr/share/dict/words on a request to the root.
$ python main.py 8080 --remote-port 8080
This tunnels port 8080 of the onion service to port 8080 locally. Note that this also works for the file server.
If you want to be able to connect to an onion service, but your application doesn't support SOCKS5 proxying, you can use netcat to tunnel a port on localhost to that onion service:
$ ncat -c "ncat --proxy-type socks5 --proxy 127.0.0.1:9050 <addr>.onion <remote-port>" -l 1234
In theory, onion-expose tunnels should have the same security properties as regular Tor onion services. Note that
this explicitly doesn't include confidentiality of files that are exposed via the file server. If you need confidentiality
for the files you're exposing, use openssl enc to encrypt it before you expose it.
However, do note that onion-expose comes with absolutely no warranty.
onion-expose supports only Python 3. It will not run on Python 2. It has been tested on Debian 8 "Jessie" with
Python 3.4 and Tor 0.2.7.6. It should run on Windows, OS X, or (Open|Free)BSD, but I haven't tested it.