Using Tor with Home Assistant for extra secure+private remote access

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42

Hello

I hope someone could shine some light here, I’m following the guide described here: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ecosystem/tor (I’m running homeassistant on a debian buster based distro).

I’ve edited the torrc file as described.
did the restart and checked the status

$: sudo systemctl restart tor
$: sudo systemctl status tor
● tor.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/tor.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Mon 2019-11-04 19:52:20 CET; 5s ago
  Process: 30117 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 30117 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Nov 04 19:52:20 ptr-g8gd1jlrariu0qbtoee systemd[1]: Starting Anonymizing overlay network for TCP 
Nov 04 19:52:20 ptr-g8gd1jlrariu0qbtoee systemd[1]: Started Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (

But the next step fails:

$ sudo more /var/lib/tor/homeassistant/hostname
more: stat of /var/lib/tor/homeassistant/hostname failed: No such file or directory

If I look in the /var/lib/tor directory, I don’t see anything homeassistant related.

:/var/lib/tor# ls -l
total 5568
-rw------- 1 debian-tor debian-tor   20442 Nov  4 19:42 cached-certs
-rw------- 1 debian-tor debian-tor 2038463 Nov  4 19:42 cached-microdesc-consensus
-rw------- 1 debian-tor debian-tor 3629219 Nov  4 19:42 cached-microdescs.new
drwx--S--- 2 debian-tor debian-tor    4096 Nov  4 19:42 keys
-rw------- 1 debian-tor debian-tor       0 Nov  4 19:42 lock
-rw------- 1 debian-tor debian-tor    3456 Nov  4 19:45 state

Any suggestion how to continue?

Thanks!

43

this solution seems to work
This is mentioned in the documentation

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/homeassistant/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8123
HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient stealth haremote1

This is what it should be for Debian Buster (or if more knowledgeable persons know what to use for version 3 …) to generate the authentication

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/homeassistant
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8123
HiddenServiceVersion 2
HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient stealth haremote1

Next step is to figure out how to get around “proxy server refusing connection”, when browsing by mobile phone …

44

That didn’t work, as I am also on Rasbian Buster:

error:

more: stat of /var/lib/tor/homeassistant/hostname failed: No such file or directory

45

these are the steps and links to the setup that is working for me: