The attached is a draft proposal for allowing tor to lie to an application about the SOCKS connection enabling it to send data optimistically.
It's going to need some fleshing out in ways I am not familiar with, but I wanted to get something out to start as we think that this is probably the best path forward for bringing back Tor Browser's optimistic SOCKS behavior. -tom
Filename: xxx-optimistic-socks-in-tor.txt Title: Optimistic SOCKS Data Author: Tom Ritter Created: 21-June-2019 Status: Draft Ticket: #5915 0. Abstract We propose that tor should have a SocksPort option that causes it to lie to the application that the SOCKS Handshake has succeeded immediately, allowing the application to begin sending data optimistically. 1. Introduction In the past, Tor Browser had a patch that allowed it to send data optimistically. This effectively eliminated a round trip through the entire circuit, reducing latency. This feature was buggy, and specifically caused problems with MOAT, as described in [0] and Tor Messenger as described in [1]. It is possible that the other issues observed with it were the same issue, it is possible they were different. Rather than trying to identify and fix the problem in Tor Browser, an alternate idea is to have tor lie to the application, causing it to send the data optimistically. This can benefit all users of tor. This proposal documents that idea. [0] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24432#comment:19 [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19910#comment:3 2. Proposal 2.1. New SocksPort Flag In order to have backward compatibility with third party applications that do not support or do not want to use optimistic data, we propose a new SocksPort flag that needs to be set in the tor configuration file in order for the optimistic beahvior to occur. The new SocksPort flag is: "OptimisticData" -- Tor will immediately report a successful SOCKS handshake and hang up if it gets an end cell rather than a connected cell. 3. Application Error Handling This behavior will cause the application talking to Tor to potentially behave abnormally as it will believe that it has completed a TCP connection. If no such connection can be made by tor, the program may behave in a way that does not accurately represent the behavior of the connection. Applications SHOULD test various connection failure modes and ensure their behavior is acceptable before using this feature. References: [RFC1928] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1928.txt
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