[tor-dev] Hacks to reduce Tor's initial download on slow Internet, sacrificing privacy?

[Holmes Wilson]

Hi everyone,

Is there a way right now to get Tor hidden service functionality (hosting a hidden service, connecting to hidden services) on a connection where the Internet is so slow and unreliable that the initial download of network information currently takes ~forever, provided one is willing to sacrifice metadata protection?

Is there a way to download, say, 100x less network information on startup and still effectively host and connect to hidden services? Or is there a way to hardcode network information with the client, since that can be installed before going into the slow Internet zone, from a CDN that is less impacted, or from a source on the local network? (I read that this is how Tor worked in the past?)

The context is the following:

I have a p2p messaging app that uses Tor and hidden services (Quiet) in a way similar to Ricochet or Onionshare. I'm going to a conference where last year the Internet was so slow that Tor's initial download of network information took too long and kept timing out, rendering Quiet unusable. The Internet was, however, fairly reliable and usable for e.g. web browsing and messaging. I'd like to be able to use Quiet at this conference. It would be used purely as a demo for a few days, and we could warn everyone that our use of Tor did not offer its typical security properties. (Then in future years we might support p2p connectivity over local wifi, like Briar does!)

My understanding is that the network information download step is to protect users against epistemic attacks. My intuition is that for situations where this doesn't matter there is some way to use Tor with a small subset of the network information and that the initial download could be skipped.

Is this true? What's the best way to do it in the Tor client we ship?

(I'm familiar with the Walking Onions paper, but looking for something that is ready now. There isn't already an implementation of Walking Onions, is there?)

Thanks!
Holmes
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/attachments/20230503/e3c58284/attachment.htm>