(FWD) Tor, Socks bind, and BitTorrent

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 07:16:04PM +0100, Paul Gardner wrote:
> OK, with a bit of fiddling I've got Azureus to run both tracker and
> peer-peer traffic through TOR, using a hidden service for the tracker and
> then a hidden service for each peer for the data traffic.

Great. I think it would be worthwhile to write up a how-to for how to
set up your tracker behind a hidden service. I bet we could handle some
(as many as several thousand) of those with our current network. Teaching
Azureus about hidden services, and to do socks4a to talk to Tor, is
also needed there. A button in Azureus to do this would probably also
be useful; and we should figure out how to tell users "you need to
install Tor to use this".

But adding a 'make your download private' button would probably be a bad
move at this point, because it wouldn't work -- after too many people
clicked it, it would work for none of them. So let's hold off on that
for now.

> Initial connection establishment is fairly slow but once the peers are
> talking its not bad (can't really test myself as I have a slow uplink).

We have some plans for how to speed up initial connection by a factor
of 2 or 3. But it's always going to involve a public key operation and
at least some circuit extension, so it's always going to be fairly slow.
The key to scalability will be getting other people to carry bandwidth,
and learning to handle unpredictable and heterogeneous relays.

--Roger