[tor-talk] Can we come up with a lighter, easier torified client apps ?

[Ted Smith]

On Thu, 2012-10-04 at 22:36 +0000, John Case wrote:
> Tom, Andrew,
> 
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Tom Ritter wrote:
> 
> > Of course those are the huge, monolithic cases.  Take simpler apps
> > like gpg, ssh, putty, pidgin (god help us), git, svn.  While tracking
> > upstream would certainly be a problem, having a statically linked tor
> > and a modified binary that sent everything over Tor I think would go a
> > long way towards getting average users using Tor safely... without
> > ever having to say the words "Proxy"  or "Socks" to them.
> 
> 
> I'm a unix engineer and a coder, and even *I* sometime just don't feel up 
> to constructing an entire proxy environment just to make an SSH connection 
> over Tor.
> 
> And it's not just a case of setup time - there is assurance and testing 
> and periodic fiddling with just to make sure you did it right, have it 
> right and will continue to have it right.  And then you wake up at night 
> and wonder if you really, really have the DNS leaking taken care of.
> 
> I know it's a big can of worms, since everyone has their favorite little 
> binaries, but surely ssh is a good start :)

Have you tried 'torsocks <favorite little binary>'?

Tor doesn't really make sense as a static library, or a library at all.
If you want to get proxied sockets, use any SOCKS library and point it
at Tor.

Tor (running only as an Onion Proxy or "client") has a large amount of
application-neutral state -- would every 'favorite little binary' set up
a separate set of circuits pre-emptively?

If you can sit down with the Tor source code and come up with a
compelling narrative for a Tor library that isn't just a SOCKS library,
I'd be interested in reading it, but I just don't see how the current
Tor design/implementation is in any way amenable to this.

-- 
Sent from Ubuntu
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