Re: tor path length

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 05:17:14PM -0700, skaoth skaoth wrote:
> I've setup a private Tor network to do some testing on. I'm trying 
> to find out how to change the default path length to a client specified 
> value. I'm interested in both values less and greater than the default.
[...]
> Is this hardcoded into the executable? Will I have to modify the source
> to allow this?

It's hard-coded. Part of the intuition for that is described here:

https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#VariablePathLength

You can change it in the code -- look at the desired_path_len element.

We periodically hear from users who think Tor is great but it's too slow,
and they don't want that stupid anonymity stuff anyway, and if they
could just use it as a set of single-hop proxies they'd be happy.

Note that most Tor relays won't let you do one-hop paths, and that's a
security feature for the relay: to quote from the above FAQ entry,
"Currently there is no reason to suspect that investigating a single
relay will yield user-destination pairs, but if many people are using
only a single hop, we make it more likely that attackers will seize or
break into relays in hopes of tracing users."

Hope that helps,
--Roger