Obfuscated URLs?

[mogulguy at yahoo.com]

--- On Tue, 6/30/09, Karsten Loesing <karsten.loesing at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> On 06/30/2009 08:47 PM, Martin Fick wrote:
> > Would it be possible to create a URL or some longer
> > string that describes a hidden path through the tor 
> > network to a specific hidden URL and to implement a 
> > routing mechanism to access documents (files) using 
> > this "Obfuscated URL"?
> 
> Two thoughts:


Thanks, for the feedback...

> - - What you describe as obfuscated URLs sounds a lot like
> precursor designs of hidden services. For example, encoding 
> a path into the locator works only as long all nodes in 
> that path are functional. Hidden services (and other 
> designs) have directory services to overcome that
> problem. Why make a step backwards?

Yes, it probably is a path that one would take while
designing hidden services.  However, I think that it
is a different fork of the main thought process that
leads to a different (not better, but better for 
somethings) use case.

Agreed, a single path encoding is a weak point, but this
may be acceptable in some cases.  Also, other mechanisms
could eventually be built on top of this mechanism to 
replicate a document to several places and provide 
several obfuscated URLs to the same content.  This 
suddenly makes this content much less vulnerable to 
single points of failure than a hidden service, 
hopefully. :)


 
> - - Tor is made for interactive communication, not for
> exchanging single files. 

I agree that it is optimized for this, but I hardly
think that you could make the claim that static content
has no place in tor, could you?  Anti censorship is not
just about dynamic content, visit onion land for plenty
of static content examples.

...not to mention that dynamic systems could potentially
be layered on top of this static mechanism, again 
hopefully. :)


> Even if you don't intend to exchange bulk files, others 
> will do so. Unfortunately, the Tor network does not have 
> the necessary capacity.

Relevance?  How does this enable bulk files transfers
anymore than what tor provides today?  I fail to see
the connection, but perhaps I a missing something.


-Martin