meh. writes: > After implementing the torchat protocol and seeing how bad it is, but > how nice the idea is, I started thinking it would be cool to have a > more general protocol for P2P use through hidden services. > > My question is, how would it scale and what would be the implications > of such a system (every user would be a hidden service and would be > constantly connected to other hidden services it wants to interact > with)?
I wonder if there's a way to extend the protocol to do ephemeral hidden services (that are only meant to be used once for a single inbound connection, perhaps, and that can be set up very quickly with low overhead). This might be something like the "reply onion" concept in the original onion routing, where you can create an object that represents an explicit route to reach a particular Tor end user (but where the route is opaque to its users, so they don't know where the connection they establish with it will go). My limited understanding of onion routing history is that reply onions were replaced by hidden services, which are meant to be long-lived and usable by many clients. I don't know whether reply onions disappeared solely on efficiency grounds or whether there are also bad security consequences. In existing hidden services both sides are building a path through the Tor network to the rendezvous, so you don't just have one side choosing the complete path. I have a vague recollection that there are bad consequences if you allow one party to choose another party's complete path through the network -- presumably based on the idea of making the other party use an entry node secretly controlled by the hidden service operator (!!!) in order to identify them. -- Seth Schoen <sch...@eff.org> Senior Staff Technologist https://www.eff.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/join 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 +1 415 436 9333 x107 _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
