Embedding Parrot in Tor as GSoC Project
Howdy, Parrot recently added a GSoC proposal idea to embed Parrot into Tor. It would be great to get the feedback from Tor developers. Also, this could be under the Parrot or the Tor GSoC project, whichever makes the most sense. The proposal idea could use more detail, but the high-level view that I imagine is: 1) Allow Parrot to talk to libtor (this will use NCI - Native Call Interface) via PIR 2) Ability to create Parrot interpreter objects from within Tor via C 3) Write glue code for a High Level Language (HLL) to talk to libtor There are various HLL's to choose from: Lua, TCL, Perl 6, Winxed, NQP and others. Duke Thanks for your help, Duke [0] http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/GSoc2011 -- Jonathan "Duke" Leto jonathan@leto.net http://leto.net
Howdy,
I've never heard of ‘libtor’. What's that?
I assumed that there was some type of core C/C++ library that implements the core functionality of Tor. It is the thing that this email thread references: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-October/017378.html
And why do you think we should want to embed Parrot into Tor?
It would allow scripting Tor with a variety of languages, but I understand if embedding is not wanted. I would like for Parrot to be able to talk to libtor, so a project that worked on bindings from Parrot VM would be interesting as well, and not involve any embedding. Mostly, I wanted feedback from Tor developers about the feasibility and interest in mentoring something like this. Duke -- Jonathan "Duke" Leto jonathan@leto.net http://leto.net
Hi Jonathan. Are you aware of the Tor control protocol [1]? This already provides an RPC method for other applications to communicate with a Tor instance. Most often this is used via TorCtl which is in Python [2], though there's Java and C# counterparts too. This gives a means of querying information, receiving events, creating/destroying circuits (which was your initial project idea), etc. Cheers! -Damian [1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/control-spec.txt [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/pytorctl.git
On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 09:29:07AM -0700, Jonathan Duke Leto wrote:
There is a libtor, but it's just an internal library that contains some of the functions shared between the various Tor tools as they're built. It isn't designed for outside apps to link to, and it doesn't actually offer the API that you'd want. But you're in luck -- Tor has a controller interface that lets other applications interact with the Tor process over a local socket, using a simple smtp-style protocol: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/control-spec.txt So that means you can write your controller application in whatever language you like. Vidalia uses C++, but it hasn't really broken out its controller support into a reusable library. The best we've got is a Python library: https://gitweb.torproject.org/pytorctl.git that is used by a variety of applications, ranging from a curses-based Tor UI: http://www.atagar.com/arm/ to a set of back-end scripts to build paths in nonstandard ways, measure bandwidth, and do other experiments: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git
A Parrot library that talks to Tor via the controller interface would be the right way to do it. The next question would be: if such a thing existed, would anybody use it? That one is harder to answer. It probably depends in part on how good it is. :) --Roger
Howdy,
Thanks for clarifying that.
I did not know about these things and they mostly seem to obviate the need for the kind of embedding project I was thinking about. This is good :)
Yes, that question *is* harder to answer. But, I don't think anybody can know unless it is tried. From what I see, if Parrot wanted bindings to Tor, we can start by seeing how the above-mentioned libraries work and go from there. Thank you very much for your detailed and informative response. Duke -- Jonathan "Duke" Leto jonathan@leto.net http://leto.net
participants (4)
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Damian Johnson -
Jonathan "Duke" Leto -
Robert Ransom -
Roger Dingledine