Experimenting with Tor and Pagekite

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Moritz Bartl <moritz at torservers.net> wrote:

> Hi Bjarni,
>
> If the user IP is not used/exposed, how could it serve as a Tor bridge or
> middle node better than if you install Tor on all your front-end proxies?
>

That is kind of what I am asking you guys, I am not sure it would - I'm
basically experimenting with this because Linus thought it might be a useful
tech to get more people involved in the Tor network.

It is exposed as the traffic exits the node, and the Tor traffic would
travel from the front-end over the Pagekite tunnel to the actual relay, it's
just doing so over a tunnel which may carry other stuff as well:


> Why would you want to run multiple bridges on one shared IP?
>

Even with Pagekite, that would be a rare case - you might end up with one IP
as a shared "entrance" for multiple nodes, but the exit to the next hop
would happen in many different places. The CPU required for the encryption
and decryption would be spread over all the "back-ends", so if that were a
bottleneck (which it probably isn't) that could be a benefit too.

Having thought about this a bit more, I do think it could be worthwhile for
Tor to allow this kind of use-case though (controlling the SNI name), but
not specifically for Pagekite. If you can make it such that one can very
early at the application layer tell the difference between Tor connections
and other TLS connections, it would become possible to host normal SSL
web-sites *on the same IPs and ports* as Tor relays. This would mask the Tor
input traffic even further.

Assuming IPs continue to become a more scarce resource and SNI becomes more
widely supported technology, name-based virtual hosting of SSL sites will
eventually become common. If a Tor entry point could be come "just another
virtual SSL host", that would allow it to blend in much better.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
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