Re: [tor-dev] The Torouter and the DreamPlug

On 7 Jun 2011, at 22:00, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 06/07/2011 01:28 PM, Andrew Lewman wrote:
>> On Tue, 7 Jun 2011 21:08:48 +0100
>> "Runa A. Sandvik" <runa.sandvik@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> Vidalia is not designed to control or configure a Tor process that
>>>> it did not start.
>>>
>>> I have tested this, and it works just fine. The question is; are we
>>> happy with something that works, even if it's being used in a way that
>>> it was not designed for?
>>
>> Vidalia was designed to do this from the start, which is why it uses
>> tcp/ip instead of some ephermeral file descriptor locally. The
>> connection between their vidalia and the tor process is in plaintext.
>> That should be the concern.
>>
>
> Yes, it should be SSL/TLS, as I've previously suggested, if we're going
> to use that as the controller.

Any idea about how we can do this between Vidalia and a Tor process? Would stunnel be useful in this case?

Vidalia needs to run a TLS server on whatever port it opens. Tor would need to know how to communicate with a TLS control port. I believe that it would be an interesting problem to try to authenticate the certificate of the remote Tor and actually one that could be solved without too much issue.

We would also need a way for users to easily change the hashed password. I can't remember if this is a feature that is already present in Vidalia.

Yes, we do need a way to change the password. We will also need a way to reset the password if the user is locked out of the control port. I generally think that this means we'll need a web UI... :-)

> I still think that a web interface isn't that big of a deal if we're
> just shipping Debian...
>
> We just need to get a list of requirements and them hammer it out.

It's not a big deal, but it will take more time to get the Torouter ready. If Vidalia can do what we want, why not use it? The user experience might be a bit better with a web interface, though.

Well, I see a number of issues. One of the main issues is that you cannot safely connect to Vidalia over a network until TLS support is added to both Vidalia and Tor. Another is authentication of that connection. Yet another is that it will be extremely confusing for a user who doesn't understand what Vidalia does or why they'd need it.

I think the best thing is to make an autoconfiguring device with a web UI; we can easily rate limit Tor to something reasonable and make it a middle node by default. In all cases it stands alone and simply plugging it into a wall (power/ethernet) will provide more capacity to the network if the OR port is reachable (ala tor-fw-helper + tor + init.d scripts to start Tor on boot).

Adding Vidalia to the mix seems like a nice to have but I don't think it's currently up to the task...

All the best,

Jake