On Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:46:50 +0000Christopher Sheats <yawnbox@emeraldonion.org> wrote:Tor Project, please increase your #IPv6 awareness/outreach similar to how
ARIN and the other RIRs try very hard to do.
Before outreach Tor would need some actual IPv6 support, as in using it forthe actual traffic of relay-to-relay communication. I tried running a fewrelays with very fast IPv6 and slow IPv4 (due to a common NAT frontend whichwas the bottleneck), but it was a complete nonstarter.
Tor relays currently don't connect over IPv6. When 10% of the network
supported IPv6, there wasn't much point, because putting a very small
number of paths over IPv6 has privacy risks. So we focused on client, guard,
and exit IPv6 support.
But currently, about 30% of the consensus weight supports IPv6. So we
are working on a grant for IPv6 support (see below).
We won't be able to prefer IPv6 until 50-67% of relays support IPv6, for
load-balancing and privacy reasons. But we plan on using the
"Happy Eyeballs" (RFC 8305) algorithm on dual-stack relays. So
sufficiently slow IPv4 will cause relays to connect over IPv6. (And we can
tune the load-balancing using the IPv4 to IPv6 delay.)
Tor supports IPv6 very
poorly and nobody cares much.
Lots of us care about IPv6. Our problem is finding *funders* who care enough
to pay for the time we need to implement this complex feature. But we're
working on a grant application right now:
It is discouraging to see so many small and large network operators not using IPv6. Why is this such a problem?
Tor relays don't automatically detect IPv6 addresses, and they don't test the reachability of IPv6 ORPorts. We are working on a grant application to add this support in Tor. (It's more complex than it seems, because we need to split the reachability checks per-ORPort, and add IPv6 extend support to Tor relays.)
Tor Project, please increase your #IPv6 awareness/outreach similar to how ARIN and the other RIRs try very hard to do.
I'll add an awareness objective to our grant application.
T