Anyone running Tor on routing/switching hardware ?

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Fri Oct 30 07:22:55 UTC 2009


I'd also say no real advantage to it.
Because the CPU in network gear is often much
less powerful than any random pc at 1/100th the price.
CPU's in routers, lets take Juniper because it's obvious
what their CPU is, pretty much do one thing, crunch BGP
tables and punt the result to silicon. They also may have to
process the first packet of various flows or deal with
protocols that haven't yet been burnt to wafers. But not much
else if the silicon is sufficiently advanced. Even if the
network facing ports dealt with the crypto bits in hardware,
the CPU side doesn't seem to be a winner for the rest of
the daemon.

Besides, no real carrier would EVER run Tor on their kilobuck line
of business router. Even if the Junos BSD shell let's you do it, wink ;-)

The advantage would more likely come from the 'just
because we can' run it on random available hardware
effect. And maybe from the set it and forget it uptimes
that router gear has.

Best market for such porting efforts might be the millions
of home linksys gateway type thingies out there that run
some sort of linux under the hood.
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