konstant@mail2tor.com writes:
[ text/plain ] I posted steps on how to connect Freenet nodes over Onioncat and Garlicat for Tor/I2P. I am looking to scale it into an Opennet inside Tor with a lot of peers:
https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-June/039056.html https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-June/039059.html
Hello konstant,
this is an interesting approach! Thanks for putting time on this :)
I find the security properties of high latency anonymity quite intriguing and I have indeed hand-waved about integrating such systems with Tor in the past.
Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with Freenet and its security properties/assumptions. It would be great if you could sketch out a small document explaining the benefits of this integration in high-level terms:
- What use cases are enabled by integrating Freenet with Tor? Who would
use this?
- What benefits do Freenet users get by this integration?
- What benefits do Tor users get by this integration?
- What's the end game here?
Tor users will have access to services such as p2p microblogging, website publishing or posting on the distributed forum, FMS, and their contributions are available even after going offline. No central point of failure.
Chinese users can reach Freenet again with Tor. China blocks Freenet with DPI for a long time.
Tor Exits are not overloaded. All traffic remains in Tor and leaves via seednodes that bridge with the plain network.
For more Freenet background theory: https://freenetproject.org/documentation.html#understand
Is the extra traffic desirable in Tor? Reading asn's comment, I was under the impression that you are interested in adding higher latency traffic such as Freenet or mixnets for better anonymity: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/crowdfunding-future-hidden-services
As Roger suggested, we should be aware of how much load this project adds to the Tor network. This means that adding metrics to estimate the extra load that "Freenet over Tor" causes should be high priority here; especially so if we think this is going to rise quickly. How easy would it be to introduce such metrics?
Easy. The Tor seednodes can track unique addresses they see.
That said, in the short term and as long as the extra load is manageable, I think we should welcome this experiment as yet another new hidden service application and see where it takes us. Who knows what kind of use cases might be created through this!
Finally, as grarpamp pointed out, the current onioncat design will fail horribly once we deploy Next Generation Hidden Services (prop224), which will happen in the medium-term future (i.e. in a year or two). You should be aware of this drawback and try to think of ways to make this idea survive in the future :)
Looking forward to see where this goes!