[tor-talk] Aside of Tor Research Project: SlowTor

[Gerardus Hendricks]

As an aside, I'm really interesed in how we could modify or build an
adapter to the web so it is more tolerant of high-latency interaction.
Seeing recent events it seems prudent to start thinking of ways in which
common applications could (for a small part) function in a high-latency
environment. We need to have a SlowTor.

It could for example work really well for many read-only uses of
applications, like reading web pages or other structured data (tweets,
video, maps, comments). A high-latency proxy to the open internet would
require nodes to cache content. The main problem is denial of service: how
to prevent nodes from forging the data itself? We assume that for the most
part, publishers won't be bothered to cryptographically vouch for the
authenticity of the data (like Freenet requires). A best-effort service
combined with BadNode flags would already be a lot.

On the writing side of things, I find it really hard to imagine how
high-latency connections would work with a modern web. Note "web", and not
"internet". I would be thinking of browser plugins written in Javascript,
that communicate with a backend that connects to the mix network. What
functionality must such a backend provide to the (JS) application?

An aside of an aside: if a node would provide a complete (non PFS) TLS
conversation between him and a webserver, could a 'verifyer' that agrees
on the certificate belonging to that Common Name, verify that the data
contained in the conversation was indeed sent by the server in possession
of the private key belonging to that certificate?

Regards,
Gerard