January 2016 - tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

Re: [tor-dev] Quantum-safe Hybrid handshake for Tor
by Ryan Carboni 04 Jan '16

04 Jan '16

> > We had a GSOC project to produce "consensus diffs", so that clients could download the differences between each consensus each hour, rather than downloading a full consensus (~1.5MB). > > It showed some great results, but still needs a little work before we merge it.https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13339 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13339> > > Still, one doesn't need to download the full consensus. 3/16ths of the consensus could work and would be more beneficial for low bandwidth clients. If Tor became popular, it wouldn't be usable. Right now it consumes the bandwidth of several colleges. If Tor got anywhere near consuming the bandwidth and popularity of a major datacenter (such as the five million user botnet spike of 2013), Tor wouldn't work too well. Facebook has hundreds of millions of active users. A few billion people live under a dictatorship. How well would Tor work if it's infrastructure and usage was scaled up a hundred times? It's not an immediate issue, but if one was to add quantum cryptography, this would be one of the issues that needs to be addressed (as it is one of many long-term issues). nb: Migrating to X448 would possibly hold up longer than Curve25519 > would since it requires a bigger quantum computer. But performance > isn't that great without using vectorization. > > Given the slow time it takes to roll things out, a timeline which begins with trusted directory keys include post-quantum crypto first, and which ends in enabling clients to use post-quantum crypto would be best.

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Re: [tor-dev] Quantum-safe Hybrid handshake for Tor
by Ryan Carboni 03 Jan '16

03 Jan '16

And yet the NSA is moving to prime numbers. A large public key isn't a very good reason to not adopt quantum-safe crypto, it just means that it requires having the Tor project to be able to scale to a larger degree. I suggest hash tables, a percentage of which are pseudorandomly downloaded. Otherwise the Tor project won't scale to 10x the relays ... even ignoring quantum cryptography.

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trac account 'proper' - Full Disclosure
by Patrick Schleizer 02 Jan '16

02 Jan '16

Hi, I've learned that using the trac account 'proper' [1] has lead to some confusion and/or curiosity. That account name is really old, it's been created while I was still anonymous. Tickets created by the trac account are created by me, Patrick Schleizer, nickname adrelanos. The arguments made in these tickets should stand or fall independently of my identity. Those are either of interest for me personally, for my general contribution to Libre Software and/or for the Whonix project. >From now, I will be using my new trac account 'adrelanos'. Cheers, Patrick [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?reporter=proper&col=id&col=s…

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Re: [tor-dev] Quantum-safe Hybrid handshake for Tor
by Ryan Carboni 02 Jan '16

02 Jan '16

The first step should be replacing the long-term keys with quantum-safe crypto.

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