[tor-dev] Potential projects for SponsorR (Hidden Services)

[George Kadianakis]

Fabio Pietrosanti - lists <lists at infosecurity.ch> writes:

> On 10/20/14 3:37 PM, George Kadianakis wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> this is an attempt to collect tasks that should be done for
>> SponsorR. You can find the SponsorR page here:
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorR
> [snip]
>>
>> == Performance Improvements ==
>>
>> This is the most juicy section. How can we make HS performance better?
>> IIUC, we are mainly interested in client-side performance, but if a
>> change makes both sides faster that's even better.
>
> I suggest to consider also the so-called Tor2webMode to became a
> standard part of Tor as a way to improve Tor Hidden Services.
>
> While Tor2web Mode has born with the goal to reduce the number of hops
> for a Tor client used together with Tor2web software, it can provide
> great benefit also for TorHS owner.
>
> A TorHS owner MAY wish to be hidden in their location or not.
>
> If a TorHS owner enable Tor2web Mode, then it's assumed that he don't
> want "location anonymity" while preserving all other properties of TorHS
> (link-level encryption, self-authenticating URI, etc).
>
> With latest improvements of #12844 the performance of Tor2web Mode will
> be even better.
>
> For TorHS like Facebook or other resources that *does not need* location
> anonymity, having shorter circuit is a great performance improvement
> either in latency either in bandwidth.
>
> I would suggest/consider to introduce Tor2web mode (or something called
> differently) to be usable on stock Tor software, to enable quick
> optimization of TorHS owner that need performance by scarifying location
> anonymity .

I fully agree that a server-side equivalent of Tor2web mode should be
made. The closest design we have so far is Roger's "encrypted
services" proposal:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/ideas/xxx-encrypted-services.txt

Before implementation, the proposal needs some polishing and we should
think of any further optimizations that can be done (e.g. the
IP-equivalent of #12844 or something?). Implementation is not super
hard, but not trivial either. It will be great if we could do this as
part of SponsorR.

Then, HSes with the Facebook threat model (who don't care about
location privacy) would be able to use this mode so that they are
faster and also cause less traffic to the network.