On Fri, Sep 02, 2022 at 12:10:35AM +0000, Holmes Wilson wrote: > At some point I got an error message that indicated that it was giving up but > that I had enough information to connect to onion addresses. I can't > reproduce the problem now on a normal network, and I just went through the > Tor code looking for the error message I saw, but I couldn't find it.
It was probably this one: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/32165 > But I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone was familiar with shortcuts Tor > can take in its connection process that safely save time and bandwidth on > slow connections if the only thing I intend to use Tor for is connecting to > onion addresses. For very throttled network connections, there is another long-standing issue that people run into during bootstrapping: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/16844 > Are there any steps in bootstrapping that can be skipped if I only care about > making and receiving onion address connections? Hm! I think the answer is "nothing easy that you can do currently." You still need to learn about most of the relays in the network, in order to make proper three-hop circuits on your side that are hard to predict even for somebody who watches what subset of the directory information you learn (this is a category of attacks known as 'epistemic attacks', in this case on routing; see https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/#danezis-pet2008 for more). In the glorious future, we might have more theoretically scalable directory designs, such as the Walking Onions approach: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/komlo but those won't be out anytime soon and also maybe it will turn out that they are most useful for their theoretical scaling properties rather than their practical ones. --Roger _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
