[tor-dev] Sending multiple streams throuh a single Tor circuit

[Piyush Kumar Sharma]

After a lot of debugging, it seems that the reason for streams failing is
as follows :
As soon as a new stream is made, it goes into the NEW state according to
Torctl logs.
Then with stem or carml running, they try to attach it to the specified
circuit.
As soon as the stream is attached, it moves to the SENTCONNECT, and if it
doesn't succeed, the state of that stream again changes to NEW after which
the connection fails (the stream waits for the 120s then gets closed
automatically with error code REASON_TIMEOUT).
A point i noted was that, a stream is in the SENTCONNECT state for a very
short duration (fraction of seconds).

Other times, when the above process does not happen, the streams
successfully move to the SUCCEEDED state after SENTCONNECT and are served
through the specified circuit.
But this behavior seems to be completely random. Is there a way to resolve
this issue?

@meejah : carml had the same problem as with stem as already explained
above.
@Nick Mathewson : Yes there are some instances where the circuit creation
itself takes a lot of time and fails sometimes. But those cases are already
handled. The main problem as we could drill down is explained above.


Regards
Piyush



On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 7:40 AM Nick Mathewson <nickm at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 1:04 PM Piyush Kumar Sharma <piyushs at iiitd.ac.in>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I am a PhD student, and am working on some measurements in Tor.
> > I am stuck at a point where i need to send multiple
> applications(streams) traffic through a single circuit.
> > I am currently using torsocks/torify to send traffic of these multiple
> applications through Tor.
> > The main problem is that, despite trying many different ways to achieve
> the same (sending multiple streams through a single circuit), i am not
> successful.
> >
> > Things i have tried :
> > 1.) Force Tor process to create only a single circuit at a time
> preventing any new circuit creation, so that any new stream would be
> attached to this only available circuit. To acheive this i have set the
> following Tor options :
> > set __DisablePredictedCircuits to 1
> > set MaxClientCircuitsPending to 1
> > set newcircuitperiod to 999999999
> > set maxcircuitdirtiness to 999999999
> > The problem with the above method is that it seems to work sometimes
> randomly. But most of the times for some reason, a new circuit is still
> created.
> >
> > 2.) Next, i assumed that maybe running torify multiple times for each
> application is the culprit, as it may try to create new circuit for each
> run. So i created a new bidirectional stream using socat, which listens on
> a local TCP port, and forwards the data to the Tor SOCKS port assuming that
> it will lead to a singe connection to local SOCKS.
> > Even this did not work and still new circuits were created randomly.
> >
> > 3.) Next i tried to attach streams to circuits manually, using the stem
> library following the link :
> https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/to_russia_with_love.html#custom-path-selection
> . This seemed to work initially, but then after every 4-5 runs, the streams
> seemed to detach automatically. Moreover, the original circuit crashed too.
>
> The stem approach (#3) ought to work in general -- the information
> here isn't enough to tell what the problem is, exactly. Is it possible
> that the circuit you are constructing is failing for some reason?
>
> --
> Nick
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