Facebook on Deep Web

Facebook’s onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud.
The idea is that the Facebook onion address connects you to Facebook’s Core WWW Infrastructure – check the URL again, you’ll see what we did there – and it reflects one benefit of accessing Facebook this way: that it provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a Facebook datacentre.

We decided to use SSL atop this service due in part to architectural considerations – for example, we use the Tor daemon as a reverse proxy into a load balancer and Facebook traffic requires the protection of SSL over that link. As a result, we have provided an SSL certificate which cites our onion address; this mechanism removes the Tor Browser’s “SSL Certificate Warning” for that onion address and increases confidence that this service really is run by Facebook. Issuing an SSL certificate for a Tor implementation is – in the Tor world – a novel solution to attribute ownership of an onion address; other solutions for attribution are ripe for consideration, but we believe that this one provides an appropriate starting point for such discussion.
Over time we hope to share some of the lessons that we have learned – and will learn – about scaling and deploying services via the Facebook onion address; we have many ideas and are looking forward to improving this service. A medium-term goal will be to support Facebook’s mobile-friendly website via an onion address, although in the meantime we expect the service to be of an evolutionary and slightly flaky nature.
We hope that these and other features will be useful to people who wish to use Facebook’s onion address.
Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to Ms. Runa Sandvik and to Dr. Steven Murdoch of UCL for their kind assistance and generous advice in the development of this project.
TOR LINK: facebookcorewwwi.onion