[tor-talk] Proposal: Making Tor Faster with TLS 1.3

[Nathaniel Suchy <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

This is an informal proposal to make Tor faster. Okay as follows:

The Tor Network increasingly suffers from the challenge of dealing with high latency and often slow connection speeds. In an aim to protect privacy, Tor Browser does not have a persistent cache of web content meaning it has to be refetched every session. This means if you want to load a blog with a 10MB Javascript bundle, well you might be waiting a bit before reading the article. Likewise increasing speed and reducing latency is extremely important. The TLS 1.2 handshake's phases 2 and 3 have a total of 3 round trips before any data can be transferred. This could add 100s of MS of latency as the relays message back and forth with one another. TLS 1.3 has a feature called 0RTT (See: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/ <https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/>), the Tor network could have considerable speed and performance gains if this is implemented into Tor. The first benefit is reduced latency because of handshakes, the second benefit is better performance on the relays (less handshakes) freeing up relays and making faster sessions.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Cordially,
Nathaniel Suchy
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