The Facebook onion address located at facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onionhttps://www.facebook.com/onion-service (formerly facebookcorewwwi.onion) is a site that allows access to

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

through the Tor protocol, using its

.onion .onion is a special-use top level domain name designating an anonymous onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the I ...

top-level domain.

Purported benefits

Prior to the release of an official .onion domain, accessing Facebook through Tor would sometimes lead to error messages and inability to access the website.

ProPublica ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists''The Guardian'', April 13, 2010P ...

explicitly referenced the existence of Facebook's .onion site when they started their own onion service. The site also makes it easier for Facebook to differentiate between accounts that have been caught up in a

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...

and those that legitimately access Facebook through Tor. As of its 2014 release, the site was still in early stages, with much work remaining to polish the code for Tor access. It has been speculated that other companies will follow suit and release their own Tor-accessible sites.

History

In October 2014, Facebook announced that users could connect to the website through a Tor onion service using the privacy-protecting

Tor browser Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

and encrypted using

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is enc ...

. Announcing the feature,

Alec Muffett Alec David Edward Muffett (born April 22, 1968) is an Anglo-American internet security evangelist, architect, and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original Unix password cracker, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing li ...

said "Facebook's onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud. ... it provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a Facebook datacentre." The network address it used at the time – facebookcorewwwi.onion – is a

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

that stands for ''Facebook's Core WWW Infrastructure''. In April 2016, it had been used by over 1 million people monthly, up from 525,000 in 2015.

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

does not operate sites through Tor, and Facebook has been applauded for allowing such access, which makes it available in countries that actively try to block Facebook. In May 2021 it updated to an onion version 3 address at facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion. This was due to the Tor Project's planned July 2021 deprecation of v2 addresses due to their inherent crackability using

brute-force attack In cryptography, a brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correc ...

s by modern hardware that did not exist at the time of their introduction (many private keys are known to equal the same v2 address due to a hash collision).

References

External links

* {{Authority control Facebook American websites Tor onion services 2014 establishments in the United States