[tor-dev] Freenet + Onioncat: Is the traffic welcome?

[konstant at mail2tor.com]

> konstant at mail2tor.com writes:
>
>> [ text/plain ]
>> I posted steps on how to connect Freenet nodes over Onioncat and
>> Garlicat
>> for Tor/I2P. I am looking to scale it into an Opennet inside Tor with a
>> lot of peers:
>>
>> https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-June/039056.html
>> https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-June/039059.html
>>
>
> Hello konstant,
>
> this is an interesting approach! Thanks for putting time on this :)
>
> I find the security properties of high latency anonymity quite intriguing
> and I
> have indeed hand-waved about integrating such systems with Tor in the
> past.
>
> Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with Freenet and its security
> properties/assumptions. It would be great if you could sketch out a small
> document explaining the benefits of this integration in high-level terms:
>
> - What use cases are enabled by integrating Freenet with Tor? Who would
> use this?
> - What benefits do Freenet users get by this integration?
> - What benefits do Tor users get by this integration?
> - What's the end game here?

Tor users will have access to services such as p2p microblogging, website
publishing or posting on the distributed forum, FMS, and their
contributions are available even after going offline. No central point of
failure.

Chinese users can reach Freenet again with Tor. China blocks Freenet with
DPI for a long time.

Tor Exits are not overloaded. All traffic remains in Tor and leaves via
seednodes that bridge with the plain network.


For more Freenet background theory:
https://freenetproject.org/documentation.html#understand


>
>> Is the extra traffic desirable in Tor? Reading asn's comment, I was
>> under
>> the impression that you are interested in adding higher latency traffic
>> such as Freenet or mixnets for better anonymity:
>> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/crowdfunding-future-hidden-services
>>
>
> As Roger suggested, we should be aware of how much load this project adds
> to
> the Tor network. This means that adding metrics to estimate the extra load
> that
> "Freenet over Tor" causes should be high priority here; especially so if
> we
> think this is going to rise quickly. How easy would it be to introduce
> such
> metrics?

Easy. The Tor seednodes can track unique addresses they see.

>
> That said, in the short term and as long as the extra load is manageable,
> I
> think we should welcome this experiment as yet another new hidden service
> application and see where it takes us. Who knows what kind of use cases
> might
> be created through this!
>
> ---
>
> Finally, as grarpamp pointed out, the current onioncat design will fail
> horribly once we deploy Next Generation Hidden Services (prop224), which
> will
> happen in the medium-term future (i.e. in a year or two). You should be
> aware
> of this drawback and try to think of ways to make this idea survive in the
> future :)
>
> Looking forward to see where this goes!
>