[tor-dev] 5-hop hidden service circuits (was: Potential projects for SponsorR (Hidden Services))

[Michael Rogers]

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On 20/10/14 14:37, George Kadianakis wrote:
> On an even more researchy tone, Qingping Hou et al wrote a
> proposal to reduce the length of HS circuits to 5 hops (down from
> 6). You can find their proposal here: 
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-February/006198.html
>
>  The project is crazy and dangerous and needs lots of analysis,
> but it's something worth considering. Maybe this is a good time to
> do this analysis?

One aspect of this proposal that might be problematic: the client and
hidden service negotiate a random number and use it to pick a
rendezvous point from a list of candidates. They must have matching
lists of candidates.

With a similar idea in mind, I recently looked into how long it takes
for two clients to obtain copies of the same consensus. I found out
that this is never guaranteed to happen, because each client may skip
a consensus each time it downloads a fresh one. That would need to be
addressed before implementing the 5-hop proposal.

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-September/007571.html

Cheers,
Michael
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