Re: How many hidden service circuits built?

[Karsten Loesing <karsten.loesing@xxxxxxx>]

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Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> On Thursday 11 December 2008, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:25:40PM +0100, Bernhard Fischer wrote:
>>> If I connect through the SOCKS interface several times at the same time
>>> to the same hidden service, does TOR open a bunch of circuits in parallel
>>> to the designated hidden service or does it just open a single one and
>>> then reuse it for every of the incoming SOCKS request?
>> It should try to reuse the same circuit.
>>
>> (You will see a bunch of circuits going to make the rendezvous happen, but
>> only one of them will be the one that all your streams get connected to.)
>>
>> --Roger
> 
> 
> Is it possible to change this behavior (maybe by a slight modification of the 
> source)?

I'm not sure what you are up to, so I'm guessing. Are you asking for a)
parallelizing connection establishment in order to reduce delay, b)
having a separate circuit to the hidden server for every
application-level stream, or something else?

As for a), we are already working on improvements to reduce the delay in
connection establishment. Did you have a look at this page?:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/hidserv.html

Part of the solution is to parallelize some of the substeps. One example
are circuits to introduction points which are built in parallel after a
delay of 15 seconds. Future ideas are to request hidden service
descriptors from the directories in parallel. But making two (or even
more) full connection establishments with all steps being performed
twice (or more times) is a bit too brute-force, isn't it? The goal is to
make hidden services faster, but in a way that doesn't put too much new
load on the network.

As for b), I don't know if this makes sense, either. Why separate the
circuits when you can multiplex an arbitrary number of streams over
them? Fault tolerance? Unlinkability of streams?

But instead of guessing what you had in mind, I'll just ask: Why do you
want to do this?

- --Karsten
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