[tor-bugs] #4849 [Tor Hidden Services]: Tor Hidden Service circuit timeout

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#4849: Tor Hidden Service circuit timeout
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  hellais              |          Owner:     
     Type:  enhancement          |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal               |      Milestone:     
Component:  Tor Hidden Services  |        Version:     
 Keywords:  ideas                |         Parent:     
   Points:                       |   Actualpoints:     
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
 It is common to contact frequently a certain set of Tor Hidden Services
 while you may contact very sporadically others. This is particularly
 important in the tor2web use case.

 Currently Tor circuits have a timeout of 10 minutes. It would be nice to
 be able to set a timeout setting for tearing down a particular circuit
 towards a certain hidden service.

 There are a few ways of achieving:

 1) Having this feature built into Tor Tor will learn what are the most
 visited tor hidden services and sets a particular keep alive based on
 statistics collected. This factor would change over time and be always
 more precise (?) This is probably a bad idea as it requires having a
 specific purpose use feature into Tor proper (Q: Would this feature be of
 benefit to regular users?)

 2) Having this feature built into !TorCtl Currently it is not possible to
 set the timeout of a particular circuit to a specific time. It would be
 nice to specify via !TorCtl that a certain circuit should live for a
 certain amount of time. This might not be good because it requires changes
 to Tor, although just the !TorCtl part.

 3) Hacking our way into making it work with current Tor It is possible to
 set a very big timeout (5 years?) through !TorCtl for *all* circuits. You
 can then cycle through the circuits and understand which ones have been
 alive for your established timeout and kill them. This is cheap to
 implement and doesn't require modification of current Tor.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4849>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online