OnionCat -- An IP-Transparent TOR Hidden Service Connector

[Robert Hogan]

On Tuesday 24 June 2008 21:01:27 Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 June 2008, M. Peterson wrote:
> > Hiho,, cool codings,
> > does that mean, emule and torrent can run over tor now?
>
> Yes, with some limitations. OnionCat (currently) does not route packets.
> You can not forward packets to arbitrary destinations to onioncat, only
> those with destinations which are associated a hidden service. It is a
> "hidden service connector" and not an "anonymizing network layer"
> (currently).
>
> That means that people running TOR and OnionCat can share data with
> torrent/donkey/... together, anonymously, on top of OnionCat but you can
> not just mix it with some "legacy" Internet-Users.
>
> > Was that not something, that was not desired?
>
> Not desired by who?
>

File-sharing on the current Tor network is frowned upon because it conflicts with 
the presumed motivations of many of the volunteers who operate servers.

That said, there is nothing stopping anyone else from creating their own parallel 
Tor network and distributing a tor bundle hardcoded with authority information 
for that network. (I know you know all this but bear with me.)

So it would be easy to imagine a software bundle that comprises:

1. A modified Tor distribution for use on the file-sharing network.
2. Onioncat
3. A torrent distribution pre-configured with the ipv6 IP of the hidden service 
created during installation.

This would then be the software client of a hidden-service/onioncat based sharing 
network. I'm sure may people would be interested in that, though I'm not sure 
performance would scale with the user base.

I've often wondered why such a parallel network doesn't already exist, even 
without the advent of onioncat.

> > How may Outproxies are then needed by the tor network?
>
> Sorry, don't know.
>
>
> Bernhard


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