[tor-talk] Fwd: twister-core 0.9.22: Tor support available

[Miguel Freitas]

Hi people,

We have just reached an important milestone: twister is now compatible with
Tor!

http://twister.net.co/

As some people may be aware, the blocking issue from Tor compatibility was
the DHT part. Because our DHT requires UDP and Tor doesn't support it (and
I'd guess it may probably never implement such thing) that was pretty much
a showstopper.

Still, running twister on top of Tor was a long time goal. As discussed in
the white paper ( http://twister.net.co/?attachment_id=355 ), the Tor
support allows a far more interesting threat model.

The solution was to implement the routing of the DHT traffic through other
twister peers. As we already have an unstructured TCP-based P2P overlay
network derived from the Bitcoin protocol, I have just extended this
protocol with the new DHT relaying commands.

So, a few minutes ago, I've been able to successfully run twister over Tor
for the first time, with all functionality. That includes downloading the
blockchain, using DHT to obtain posts, profiles, avatars and the swarm peer
lists from trackers, and also synchronizing post's torrents. All the 3
network overlays were tunneled by the Tor socks5 proxy.

In order to try this feature just add the "-proxy=127.0.0.1" argument to
twisterd command line (assuming your Tor daemon is running on localhost
with port 9050).

It might take some time to reach a few relaying nodes though. This is
probably going to improve over the next few days as people update their
twister clients.

regards,

Miguel