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?