Thanks, this is super helpful.
And yes, it was that error message. The "such as paths to onion services" was a
tease, because I was like "oh yes, that's exactly what I need! I should ask
someone about this!" :)
Here's to a glorious future full of scalable directory designs that are both
practical and theoretical!
H
On Fri Sep 2, 2022, 01:41 AM GMT, Roger Dingledine <mailto:a...@torproject.org>
wrote:
> 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
>
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