Re: [tor-talk] Tor Relay Smartphone App

[Casey Rodarmor <casey@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Also, a sort of related question: Would a dedicated raspberry pi with a
decent OS on a high-quality 100M/100M connection do more harm than good?
Would it be able to push significant traffic with its CPU?

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 7:28 AM, Casey Rodarmor <casey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Thank you very much for the pointer to that thread, super interesting!
>
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 6:32 AM, isis <isis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> The problem is this: All clients fetch information about all the relays
>> in the
>> network from the Directory Authorities/Mirrors, and these fetches take up
>> a
>> certain amount of bandwidth. If the relay is too slow, the bandwidth
>> provided
>> by that relay does not compensate for the directory fetching bandwidth
>> used to
>> tell people about the relay, and thus it is actively harming the network.
>>
>
> This is probably a silly question, but why don't nodes themselves gossip
> in a P2P fashion about other nodes they've seen or heard about, in order to
> avoid taxing directory authorities and mirrors? I'm sure that there are
> security implications for this, but perhaps they could be overcome by
> preferring nodes in different IP blocks and with diverse traceroutes, etc.
>
>
>> Additionally, since Tor processes are normally CPU-bound, most relays
>> aren't
>> able to use all their available bandwidth with a single Tor process.
>> Running a
>> relay on ARM (or likely any other mobile/low power) CPU will only further
>> limit how much traffic your relay is actually pushing.
>>
>
> Is this because of the outer encryption wrapper layer decryption?
>
>
>> Additionally, if you're attempting to do this with Orbot on an Android
>> device,
>> you'll run into issues with Android's process management system and the
>> Tor
>> process randomly dying unexpectedly. This means that you are providing an
>> unreliable, flapping relay which is actively messing up other people's
>> connections through the Tor network.
>>
>
> Is this an issue on all devices, or just some of them? Perhaps oorbot
> could refuse to run, or at least display a warning if it looks like the
> device is flaky.
>
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