[tor-dev] Hidden Service Scaling

[Christopher Baines]

On 08/10/13 06:52, Christopher Baines wrote:
> I have been looking at doing some work on Tor as part of my degree, and
> more specifically, looking at Hidden Services. One of the issues where I
> believe I might be able to make some progress, is the Hidden Service
> Scaling issue as described here [1].
> 
> So, before I start trying to implement a prototype, I thought I would
> set out my ideas here to check they are reasonable (I have also been
> discussing this a bit on #tor-dev). The goal of this is two fold,  to
> reduce the probability of failure of a hidden service and to increase
> hidden service scalability.

Previous threads on this subject:
 https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005556.html
 https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005674.html

I have now implemented a prototype, for one possible design of how to
allow distribution in hidden services. While developing this, I also
made some modifications to chutney to allow for the tests I wanted to write.

In short, I modified tor such that:
 - The services public key is used in the connection to introduction
points (a return to the state as of the v0 descriptor)
 - multiple connections for one service to an introduction point is
allowed (previously, existing were closed)
 - tor will check for a descriptor when it needs to establish all of its
introduction points, and connect to the ones in the descriptor (if it is
available)
 - Use a approach similar to the selection of the HSDir's for the
selection of new introduction points (instead of a random selection)
 - Attempt to reconnect to an introduction point, if the connection is lost

With chutney, I added support for interacting with the nodes through
Stem, I also moved the control over starting the nodes to the test, as
this allows for more complex behaviour.

Currently the one major issue is that using an approach similar to the
HSDir selection means that introduction points suffer from the same
issue as HSDir's currently [1]. I believe any satisfactory solution to
the HSDir issue would resolve this problem also.

One other thing of note, tor currently allows building circuits to
introduction points, through existing introduction points, and selecting
introduction points on circuits used to connect to other introduction
points. These two issues mean that a failure in one introduction point,
can currently cause tor to change two introduction points. (I am not
saying this needs changing, but you could adjust the circuit creation,
to prevent some extra work later if a failure occurs).

Any comments regarding the above would be welcome.


I have put the code for this up, but it should not be used for anything
other than private testing (and will not work properly outside of
chutney at the moment anyway).

The modifications to tor can be found in the disths branch of:
 git://git.cbaines.net/tor.git
The modifications and additional tests for chutney can be found in the
disths branch of:
 git://git.cbaines.net/chutney.git

To run the tests against the new code, you would do something along the
lines of:
 git clone -b disths git://git.cbaines.net/tor.git
 git clone -b disths git://git.cbaines.net/chutney.git

 cd tor
 ./autogen.sh
 ./configure
 make clean all

 cd ../chutney
 git submodule update --init
 export PATH=../tor/src/or:../tor/src/tools/:$PATH

 ls networks/hs-* | xargs -n 1 ./chutney configure
 ls networks/hs-* | xargs -n 1 ./chutney --quiet start

The last command should yield some output similar to:
 networks/hs-dual-intro-fail-3 PASS
 networks/hs-intro-fail-2 PASS
 networks/hs-intro-fail-3 PASS
 networks/hs-intro-select-2 PASS
 networks/hs-start-3 PASS
 networks/hs-stop-3 PASS
 networks/hs-tripple-intro-fail-3 PASS


1: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8244

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