On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 10:10:15PM -0500, Nick Mathewson wrote:
And if a very few do, maybe the solution is to move to a new TLS connection for those rare cases, rather than impose a 2-byte penalty on every cell in all cases.)
Maaaybe, but I sure can't think of a sane testable design for that. Can you? To do this sanely, we'd need to negotiate this before we exchange any actual data, and predict in advance that we'd want it. (We wouldn't want to do it on-the-fly for connections that happen to have large numbers of circuits: that way lies madness.)
Also, I think those "rare cases" are communications between the busiest Tor nodes. I think those communications might represent a reasonably large fraction of total Tor bytes, such that having a fallback mode might not save us so much.
Ah. By "a new TLS connection", I didn't mean a new design or anything -- I meant simply a second TLS connection.
And also, this only adds 1/256 additonal overhead before TLS happens. Not huge IMO. We could save far more than that by more intelligent TLS use, if we needed to.
I agree that it's an ok price to pay if we decide it's the best way to go.
--Roger