Re: [tor-talk] Separate Tors for Communities/Special Purposes?

[Jacob Appelbaum <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/23/2011 08:33 AM, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> I know this is crazy talk, but would it be very bad to provide an easy
> way/guide on how to operate a seperate Tor network for communities? I
> know the anonymity properties of that would suck, but for
> anti-censorship it could still have more pros than cons, no?
> 
> I've been thinking about experimenting with a VoIP-only (port/protocol)
> Tor network, but will never get around to actually do it. It would be
> interesting to see how a (real world) "only encrypted, well-known ports"
> Tor network would behave.
> 

Hi Moritz,

Ironkey has their own Tor-like network in production and people use it.
It probably isn't very safe for most uses but it might be fine for
others, who knows?

Other people have similar networks using Tor and some run them as a test
network. I think test networks are generally fine, they help us find
bugs and generally it's exciting for someone to spin up a bunch of
systems all at once. That seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I agree that it's crazy talk for anonymity reasons. However, you
actually said the one word that absolves you of being instantly
immolated by fire from the heavens: experiment!

Experiments are great! Warning users using it that you're undertaking an
experiment that provides no security, no anonymity and so on is also
great! Unless they need it and they can't provide informed consent. See
also the "immolation by fire" for this case. :) You probably want to
limit who can even access the nodes without ensuring they're actually
informed and that you feel comfortable with their understanding of the
point of your experiments.

I think it would be really interesting if you ran your own experimental
Tor network to understand if it's even possible to run usable VoIP calls
over a network of Tor nodes. I wonder what protocols would be useful?

I'm not sure what VoIP security model you're thinking of - other than
ZRTP, I'm not sure there's much in the VoIP security world worth much...

Lets talk about it at the TorDev meeting?

All the best,
Jake
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