[tor-dev] UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header

[Alec Muffett]

On 15 Nov 2017 12:18, "Iain R. Learmonth" <irl at torproject.org> wrote:

Is this not what TorDNSEL does?
https://www.torproject.org/projects/tordnsel.html.en


Hi Iain!

That certainly sounds like it will give you the answer! But although it
would give the right kind of answer, it is not what I am asking for.

At the scale of websites like Facebook or the New York Times, a timely
response is required for the purposes of rendering a page. The benefits of
solving the problem at "enterprise" scale then trickle down to
implementations of all sizes.

Speaking as a programmer, it would be delightfully easy to make a DNS query
and wait for a response to give you an answer... but then you have to send
the query, wait for propagation, wait for a result, trust the result, debug
cached versions of the results, leak the fact that all these lookups are
going on, and so forth.

This all adds adds up to latency and cost, as well as leaking metadata of
your lookups; plus your local DNS administrator will hate you (cf: doing
name resolution for every webpage fetch for writing Apache logs, is frowned
upon.  Better to log the raw IP address and resolve it later if you need.

On the other hand: if you are running a local Tor daemon, a copy of the
entire consensus is held locally and is (basically) definitive.  You query
it with near zero lookup latency, you get an instant response with no
practical lag behind "real time", plus there are no men in the middle, and
there is no unwanted metadata leakage.

If the Tor daemon is on the local machine, then the lookup cost is
near-zero, and - hey! - you are encouraging more people to run more tor
daemons, which (as above) has to be a good thing.

So: the results are very close to what TorDNSEL provides, but what I seek
is something with different and better latency, security, reliability and
privacy qualities than TorDNSEL offers.

    - alec
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