OnionShare is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

application, which uses the

Tor network Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their Internet traffic ...

to share files. It is available on most major platforms. It also lets users host websites and chat in a secure and anonymous manner. It uses peer-to-peer sharing over Tor to preserve privacy and anonymity.

Features

Its main features are: * Sending and receiving large files peer-to-peer over tor network. * Chat ephemerally. * Host a website. The distinguishing feature of OnionShare is that users can do these things while maintaining anonymity. Because of this, sensitive document sharing and whistleblowing activities are a primary use-case of the app.

Sending files

Sending large files over the internet can be a hassle without centralized servers. OnionShare made it easier to share files because of its

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

nature. This also circumvented surveillance, possible because of centralized services. The circumvention is allowed by hosting shared files on tor network.

Hosting websites

OnionShare allows hosting static websites without

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

from the app. This feature became available as of version 2.2. These sites can be visited by any browser that supports .onion sites, such as

Tor Browser Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their Internet traffic ...

Usage

OnionShare is most notably aimed at being used for sharing sensitive files and whistleblowing.

History

OnionShare was released in 2014. Its initial release was hampered by the

RIAA The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/o ...

and

MPAA The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, the mini-major Amazon MGM Studios, as well as the video streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. F ...

, who wanted to limit peer-to-peer file sharing solutions. They both actively lobbied against peer-to-peer protocols and software in which they had a hard time finding investment and development for, hence why it took so long to release such a tool. In February 2019, OnionShare 2 was released. It came with macOS sandbox enabled by default, support for v3 onion services, translations, etc. The .onion addresses were ephemeral by default, as always. In October 2021, OnionShare patched two low risk vulnerabilities which were uncovered in a security advisory by IHTeam. In December 2021, Radically Open Security published their penetration report of the audit conducted on OnionShare. It was financed by Open Tech Fund and targeted version 1.1. The most impactful vulnerability found allowed to render arbitrary HTML inside the desktop application and a

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

based on previously undisclosed Qt image parsing. 2 elevated, 4 low and 3 moderate severity issues were found. All issues were resolved before publication of the report.

References

External links

* * {{File sharing 2014 software File sharing software File sharing software that uses Qt Free file sharing software Free software programmed in Python Cross-platform free software Software using the GNU General Public License