[tor-talk] transparent tor routers

[Markus Hitter]

Am 18.01.2016 um 00:10 schrieb Christian Stöveken:
> The question was whether the tor project would be interested in gaining
> these
> new users or not and also about the impact of an increase e.g. 1000 or more
> of these
> boxes (users) would have on the tor network.

A few points come to mind:

- AFAIK it's true, the more boxes there are, the safer the network is.

- Typical ISP plans have ridiculously low upstream rates, at least here
in Germany. For example a popular DSL contract is 16 Mbit downstream,
but only 1 Mbit upstream. To operate a relay or gateway the lower of
both numbers matters, so one can offer only one Mbit.

- The Tor network carries data about all network connected relays and
gateways around, so the more boxes there are, the bigger this chunk
gets. At some point such boxes (their upload bandwidth) are exhausted
with just this maintenance stuff. Not sure where this point is, also
found no related investigations.

- Why do you see a need for dedicated hardware? An off the shelf router
running OpenWRT works just fine. Install the tor package, edit torrc and
it works. I run such a thing (TP-Link WDR3600) and have no reason to
think hardware couldn't keep up with the required computing. Caveat: I'm
not aware of a tool to test computing demands either, I just see free
RAM, free 'disk' and only 5% load.

- One thing is indeed missing: up to date Tor packages for OpenWRT.
Their current stable release comes with Tor 0.2.5.12, several versions
behind what the Tor project offers.


In case you want to have a look (my plan is 20/1 Mbit cable):
https://globe.torproject.org/#/relay/C1B80BA2D97C33851DE08FD061F531A129705988

Did an upgrade on Jan 4th and forgot to backup the keys, so data
currently goes only 2 weeks back. Graphs weren't much better with the
previous keys, over a whole year only 2 or 3 days actually forwarding
some TCP packages.


Markus

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Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/