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Nice. I am hoping onion services become more ubiquitous for desktop use. So many decentralized networks work so hard to solve things like NAT busting and networ

Nice. I am hoping onion services become more ubiquitous for desktop use. So many decentralized networks work so hard to solve things like NAT busting and network issues, and they still forget about anonymity. I am personally working on a tiny side project to build a chat/forum/etc platform based around onion services for all users. Traditionally, it was annoying to have to ask users to install Tor and open up the control port so your app could leverage it. In a recent alpha there is an experimental tiny little C API that can start the Tor system in-app [0]. Leveraging some of the work from [1], I put in some effort to get all the steps working to compile Tor statically in a a single Rust exe on Windows [2]. As Tor's embeddability game increases, I hope more apps will consider using it as part of their network stack. Granted I know the problems that are inherent with "vendoring" security libs like these, but for some uses the benefits outweigh the costs of requiring separate downloads and separate daemons running. 0 - https://blog.torproject.org/tor-0331-alpha-released-back-unstable-development https://blog.torproject.org/tor-0331-alpha-released-back-uns... 1 - https://github.com/iCepa/Tor.framework https://github.com/iCepa/Tor.framework 2 - https://github.com/cretz/rtsw-poc https://github.com/cretz/rtsw-poc

jerheinze 9y ago
A mix between IPFS and onions would also be very promising. There's current work on that.[1] [1] : https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37
- kodablah 9y ago
  Yeah, I've seen that. OpenBazaar's onion transport is similar to what I'm talking about when I mean the user has to have their own tor process IIRC. I would have used Go instead of Rust of CGO on Windows and static compilation didn't suck so much.
synchronise 9y ago
Would it be possible for you to port your work to I2P as well? It's good to have a fallback network in case issues arise in Tor and something needs to plug the gap in the interim, and I2P would fulfill that roll pretty well.
- kodablah 9y ago
  There's not really much work to speak of yet. Last I looked at i2p, it carried a JVM with it and the C impl was not full featured iirc. Will have to look again.
  - synchronise 9y ago
    The C++ routers have now largely become feature complete, IIRC they've even ported I2P-Bote to work on them. And you have the JVM reference router still being developed, so there's at least three different implementations of the router and that helps with finding bugs and the like.

jerheinze 9y ago

A mix between IPFS and onions would also be very promising. There's current work on that.[1] [1] : https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37

kodablah 9y ago
Yeah, I've seen that. OpenBazaar's onion transport is similar to what I'm talking about when I mean the user has to have their own tor process IIRC. I would have used Go instead of Rust of CGO on Windows and static compilation didn't suck so much.

synchronise 9y ago

Would it be possible for you to port your work to I2P as well? It's good to have a fallback network in case issues arise in Tor and something needs to plug the gap in the interim, and I2P would fulfill that roll pretty well.

kodablah 9y ago
There's not really much work to speak of yet. Last I looked at i2p, it carried a JVM with it and the C impl was not full featured iirc. Will have to look again.
- synchronise 9y ago
  The C++ routers have now largely become feature complete, IIRC they've even ported I2P-Bote to work on them. And you have the JVM reference router still being developed, so there's at least three different implementations of the router and that helps with finding bugs and the like.