[tor-dev] Stormy (was Re: Potential projects for SponsorR (Hidden Services))

[George Kadianakis]

Griffin Boyce <griffin at cryptolab.net> writes:

> Roger Dingledine wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>
>>> - #8902 	Rumors that hidden services have trouble scaling to 100
>>> concurrent connections
>
>   I've been curious about this ticket for a while, and happy to
> structure&run a follow-up test on a controlled server.  Since the
> original problem was with an IRC server, it makes sense to set one up
> for the purposes of a test, and then set up a secondary machine for
> user' connections and an extra monitoring point.
>

Yes, someone testing this theory would be awesome!

I would be surprised if 100 connections is the _exact_ number where
HSes starts dying. However, I'd totally believe that there might be
issues causing HSes to get more unreliable after some load. We should
find these issues!

>   I suspect that there are other factors that might have influenced
> that report.  Could it be an issue with one of the intermediary
> points?  There certainly *seem* to be tons of people using the OFTC
> hidden service, but that could be perception (ie, still <100
> concurrent users).
>
> <snip>
>
>> What sorts of hidden service examples are we missing from the world
>> that
>> we'd really like to see, and that would help everybody understand the
>> value and flexibility of hidden services?
>>
>> Along these lines would be fleshing out the "hidden service challenge"
>> idea I've been kicking around, where as a follow-up to the EFF relay
>> challenge, we challenge everybody to set up a novel hidden service. We
>> would somehow need to make it so people didn't just stick their current
>> website behind a hidden service -- or maybe that would be an excellent
>> outcome?
>
>   This could be fun. =)  We could put out a blog post when Stormy
> reaches 1.0 about this too.
>

Ah Stormy!

I was a fan of the APAF project [0] and Stormy seems to be its
successor. I liked APAF because it would be the LAMP of Hidden
Services: it would make them easier to setup and configure.

For this reason, I think Stormy fits very well with Roger's hopes of
"improving" the role of HSes in society.

I'm excited to learn what you've been cooking in this front.

Is there a document that describes what Stormy aims to do? It would be
great if such a design document existed even if Stormy is not at 1.0
yet :) The document doesn't need to be big or detailed, but it would
be great if we could learn what Stormy is about.

[0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/apaf.git/blob/HEAD:/spec.txt