Re: [tor-talk] Tor in other software

[Seth David Schoen <schoen@xxxxxxx>]

Derric Atzrott writes:

> Good day all,
> 
> Would it be useful at all, when developing other software,
> to route its communications through Tor?
> 
> I'm mostly just curious if it would be useful to the Tor
> project to design software that makes use of Tor in order
> to help provide more cover traffic for the Tor network.

There was just a new article suggesting that using Tor can be
counterproductive for Bitcoin:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6079

There's an older article suggesting that it's also a problem for
BitTorrent:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/leet11/tech/full_papers/LeBlond.pdf

Maybe the lesson of this is that applications starting with "Bit-"
have anonymity risks from using Tor. :-)

More seriously, the Tor Project has traditionally encouraged people
to make various things run over Tor, and there are definitely things
that run over Tor other than web browsing, including TorBirdy, Pond,
and OnionShare (which is sort of web browsing).

I think it would be great if someone who's read both the "Bad Apple" and
the "Bitcoin over Tor" papers could explain if there are any generalizable
lessons about exactly what makes it risky to run a particular service
over Tor.  Maybe that could help future developers make better choices
about how to use Tor.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen@xxxxxxx>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
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