Closing streams

When an anonymized TCP connection is closed, or an edge node encounters error on any stream, it sends a 'RELAY_END' message along the circuit (if possible) and closes the TCP connection immediately. If an edge node receives a 'RELAY_END' message for any stream, it closes the TCP connection completely, and sends nothing more along the circuit for that stream.

The body of a RELAY_END message begins with a single 'reason' byte to describe why the stream is closing. For some reasons, it contains additional data (depending on the reason.) The values are:

       1 -- REASON_MISC           (catch-all for unlisted reasons)
       2 -- REASON_RESOLVEFAILED  (couldn't look up hostname)
       3 -- REASON_CONNECTREFUSED (remote host refused connection) [*]
       4 -- REASON_EXITPOLICY     (Relay refuses to connect to host or port)
       5 -- REASON_DESTROY        (Circuit is being destroyed)
       6 -- REASON_DONE           (Anonymized TCP connection was closed)
       7 -- REASON_TIMEOUT        (Connection timed out, or relay timed out
                                   while connecting)
       8 -- REASON_NOROUTE        (Routing error while attempting to
                                   contact destination)
       9 -- REASON_HIBERNATING    (Relay is temporarily hibernating)
      10 -- REASON_INTERNAL       (Internal error at the relay)
      11 -- REASON_RESOURCELIMIT  (Relay has no resources to fulfill request)
      12 -- REASON_CONNRESET      (Connection was unexpectedly reset)
      13 -- REASON_TORPROTOCOL    (Sent when closing connection because of
                                   Tor protocol violations.)
      14 -- REASON_NOTDIRECTORY   (Client sent RELAY_BEGIN_DIR to a
                                   non-directory relay.)

   [*] Older versions of Tor also send this reason when connections are
       reset.

Clients and relays MUST accept reasons not on the above list, since future versions of Tor may provide more fine-grained reasons.

For most reasons, the format of RELAY_END is:

Reason [1 byte]

For REASON_EXITPOLICY, the format of RELAY_END is:

      Reason                      [1 byte]
      IPv4 or IPv6 address        [4 bytes or 16 bytes]
      TTL                         [4 bytes]

(If the TTL is absent, it should be treated as if it were 0xffffffff. If the address is absent or is the wrong length, the RELAY_END message should be processed anyway.)

Tors SHOULD NOT send any reason except REASON_MISC for a stream that they have originated.

Implementations SHOULD accept empty RELAY_END messages, and treat them as if they specified REASON_MISC.

Upon receiving a RELAY_END message, the recipient may be sure that no further messages will arrive on that stream, and can treat such messages as a protocol violation.

After sending a RELAY_END message, the sender needs to give the recipient time to receive that message. In the meantime, the sender SHOULD remember how many messages of which types (CONNECTED, SENDME, DATA) it would have accepted on that stream, and SHOULD kill the circuit if it receives more than permitted.

--- [The rest of this section describes unimplemented functionality.]

Because TCP connections can be half-open, we follow an equivalent to TCP's FIN/FIN-ACK/ACK protocol to close streams.

An exit (or onion service) connection can have a TCP stream in one of three states: 'OPEN', 'DONE_PACKAGING', and 'DONE_DELIVERING'. For the purposes of modeling transitions, we treat 'CLOSED' as a fourth state, although connections in this state are not, in fact, tracked by the onion router.

A stream begins in the 'OPEN' state. Upon receiving a 'FIN' from the corresponding TCP connection, the edge node sends a 'RELAY_FIN' message along the circuit and changes its state to 'DONE_PACKAGING'. Upon receiving a 'RELAY_FIN' message, an edge node sends a 'FIN' to the corresponding TCP connection (e.g., by calling shutdown(SHUT_WR)) and changing its state to 'DONE_DELIVERING'.

When a stream in already in 'DONE_DELIVERING' receives a 'FIN', it also sends a 'RELAY_FIN' along the circuit, and changes its state to 'CLOSED'. When a stream already in 'DONE_PACKAGING' receives a 'RELAY_FIN' message, it sends a 'FIN' and changes its state to 'CLOSED'.

If an edge node encounters an error on any stream, it sends a 'RELAY_END' message (if possible) and closes the stream immediately.

Tor Specifications

Closing streams