[tor-dev] RFC: Ephemeral Hidden Services via the Control Port

[Andreas Krey]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2015 05:06:37 +0000, carlo von lynX wrote:
....
> the advantages of that aren't obvious to me. why would i need to
> make every networking app hold the hand of its router to let it
> know it's still needed?

You answer your question yourself:

> tor is on its way to becoming an AF_TOR - a networking esssential.
> making a hidden service could one day be as simple as doing
> listen() on an AF_TOR socket...

The AF_TOR listener would go away with closing the listener socket
as well (and thus is bound to the lifetime of the process); so binding
a hidden service to the control connection is the obvious analogy.

Whether tor as such should exit with loss of control connections
is (more) debatable - if my app starts the tor process, I'd expect
it to terminate when it detects that I'm no longer there. If it's
a system/shared daemon we'd need to talk about how it comes into
existence in the first place, and how it is shared.

Also, would you entrust your hidden service keys to a system-wide
tor process? :-)

Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800