[tor-dev] Transport composition

[Kevin P Dyer]

Hi George,

Maybe I'm missing something from the discussions that happened eight
months ago at the dev meeting. (as per the initial comment in [1])
However, I guess I'm a bit confused about the motivation.

Just to be clear, the goal is to be able to combine multiple
transports easily, right? For example, we may want a transport that
has the DPI-resistance of obfsproxy, but the address diversity of
flashproxy.

My main concern is that a general composition framework is going to
add uneeded complexity to the interface between Tor and the pluggable
transports. I understand the long-term benefits to being able to
compose pluggable transports, but my concern is that it won't work
well in practice, will be a nightmare to manage/deploy/develop, and
will have irreconcilable performance bottlenecks.

I think pluggable transport composition will be a good topic to
discuss at the PT standup on Friday. To get my head around the current
design, it would be great if we could discuss a few use cases beyond
obfsproxy+flashproxy.

-Kevin

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7167

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 3:43 AM, George Kadianakis <desnacked at riseup.net> wrote:
> Hello Kevin,
>
> If you are interested in learning more about the transport combiner
> idea we were recently discussing, check out trac tickets #10061, #9744
> and #7167.
>
> It would be awesome if you could comment with any ideas or criticisms
> you have.
>
> Cheers!