A default setting in Apache Web servers can de-anonymize the hidden service allowing an attacker to obtain details on the hosting.
The Apache Status module allows monitoring activities of an Apache Web Server, it displays a sort of cockpit including current server statistics. The current server state includes the following information:
- The number of worker serving requests
- The number of idle worker
- The status of each worker, the number of requests that worker has performed and the total number of bytes served by the worker (*)
- A total number of accesses and byte count served (*)
- The time the server was started/restarted and the time it has been running for
- Averages giving the number of requests per second, the number of bytes served per second and the average number of bytes per request (*)
- The current percentage CPU used by each worker and in total by Apache (*)
- The current hosts and requests being processed (*)
“On most distributions, Apache ships with a handy feature called mod_status enabled. It’s a page located at /server-status that displays some statistics, like uptime, resource usage, total traffic, enabled virtual hosts, and active HTTP requests. For security reasons, it’s only accessible from localhost by default.
This seems fairly reasonable, until you realize the Tor daemon runs on localhost. Consequently, any hidden service using Apache’s default config has /server-status exposed to the world. What could a malicious actor do in that case? They could spy on potentially sensitive requests. They could deduce the server’s approximate longitude if the timezone is set. They could even determine its IP address if a clearnet Virtual Host is present.” reads the blog post about the issue.
sudo ap2dismod status
Once disabled the mod_status, users will be displayed a 403 or 404 Error message.
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