Re: [tor-talk] Cloak Tor Router

[Lars Boegild Thomsen <lth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 01 November 2014 12:39:59 Aymeric Vitte wrote:
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1227374637/cloak, I would say that 
> the presentation is less "marketing oriented" than the anonaflop, after 
> a quick look, maybe the look of the box and its size does not appear 
> obvious to the potential pledgers.

Yeah I guess we are less "marketing oriented" perhaps even to a fault.  Anonabox definitely kicked up more interest than Cloak have done so far.

The enclosure design has not been finalized but we do have an idea and a designer working on it and Adrian have just changed the image to show the first rendering.  Do check it out if you feel like it - I think the "stealth look'n'feel) is quite cool.  Size wise it will be smaller than a TP-Link MR3020.

> And probably you know already the drawdbacks of such approach, 

I am aware of some but I am also quite sure there are some I haven't considered, so input is appreciated.

I think the hardest part is to make non-technical users aware that a Tor router can only do so much.  Their behavior using such a router is just as important (or more).

> so from 
> my standpoint some minimal rules should be added not to fool the users 
> but this will make the device less interesting for them, like: only 
> allow https traffic,

The trick is to find a balance and I guess that is what I personally hope to find by discussing it here.  If a general consensus over a reasonable list of ports that are routed through Tor could be reached that would be great.

HTTPS you say.  What about for example XMPP, IMAP etc? 

> do not run Tor over Tor (ie if the user is using 

The Tor over Tor that you mention (and someone else mentioned it too) is interesting.  That I hadn't thought about at all honestly.

Question is - can that actually be done technically at a networking level?  Can Tor in fact bootstrap itself over a Tor connection?

> But that's not my point, can such device run nodejs and did you ever try 
> it/compare it with the traditional approach?

Hmmm, I am a little confused about the node.js question.  As I mentioned I am developing Internet of Things modules based on the same hardware design and I have actually managed to get node.js running on it.  We were looking for a scripting language that didn't put too much strain on the rather limited hardware resources (python, perl, erlang and well node.js) and node.js was by far the most well behaved.  It is not small though.  I think the Flash footprint was in the region of 3-4 MB and it is quite memory hungry.  Essentially node.js take more resources to itself than the tor daemon.

> The interest is that nodejs 
> packages/apps are much more light than usual C/C++ packages

That depends really.  By themselves yes they are smaller.  But the node.js is not small and memory is perhaps the biggest issue.  Like all scripting languages node.js rely on some garbage collection of resources that are no longer used and it tends to leave a lot of wasted resources around for a while.

> Potential applications (among tons of possible ones) see the links 
> below: node-Tor (Cloak with a much smaller package), Peersm 
> clients/bridges [1] (permanent background processes in the box, like 
> bittorrent clients in ISP boxes), torrent-live (find/block/track 
> monitoring spies + maintain a real time blocklist bittorrent client)

My personal expertise is networking and embedded Linux and I would be happy to run some tests on this and/or participate in any projects getting something like this going.

> [1] https://github.com/Ayms/node-Tor/tree/master/install

-- 
Lars Boegild Thomsen
https://reclaim-your-privacy.com
Jabber: lth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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