Re: (FWD) Tor, Socks bind, and BitTorrent

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 07:44:26AM +0100, Paul Gardner wrote:
> I have it working at the moment by proxying the tracker traffic (currently
> defaulting to SOCKS V5 due to Java doing the proxying for us) and outbound
> peer-to-peer traffic (via SOCKS 4a lashed up by myself). Of course, if
> eveyone relies on outbound only then things don't work, so this approach
> will only help if a small percentage of peers are taking it.

Right. Bram and I talked early on about whether we should arrange it so
Tor and BT would work well together like this, and the conclusion was
that we shouldn't. BT is all about efficiency (getting data blocks from
various points directly to you, without a middleman), and Tor in that
respect is all about inefficiency (making sure the data doesn't travel
directly to you). So if you're willing to take the inefficiency hit from
Tor, then BT doesn't buy you much anymore.

> Are there plans for a Java version of your software? SSL is "built in", as
> are a lot of other security functions, so it may be fairly straight forward
> to implement.

The JAP team has implemented the Tor protocol inside their JAP client. It
lets you pick which network (Web mixes or Tor) you use. Their code is
in Java, and is free. I think it's working in the beta releases now,
but I haven't been keeping up with when they're planning to release it.

> Do you think you could ever scale to carry BT traffic?

Yes, but it's going to take a lot of work. The key task is to let more
clients act like servers. But ideally, while we add more servers, we
still want some way of limiting the adversary from signing up lots of
servers and attracting lots of traffic (which would defeat anonymity).
So we're working on ways to scale without giving up much anonymity.

--Roger