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Tor dev here! We're super excited about this launch! The lead dev on this feature, who also wrote the blog post, is taking some well deserved r&r after getting

Tor dev here! We're super excited about this launch! The lead dev on this feature, who also wrote the blog post, is taking some well deserved r&r after getting this feature out the door. I was somewhat tangentially involved (I work on the Shadow simulator, which we used to test, evaluate, and tune this feature) but can take a stab at answering questions. Otoh comments on the blog post itself are likely to be seen by more experienced tor devs than myself :)

throwaway202205 4y ago
Thanks for working on Tor! Slightly off-topic but do you have any pointer for someone who would like to help optimizing Tor? The current documents portal [1] has a big "OUTDATED" banner attached, and the WIP new portal contains too little information for me to make sense of how Tor works internally. I worked on some areas of TBB before, but still feel like I don't know enough about Tor's internal. [1]: https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/documentation#DesignDoc https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/documentation#DesignDoc
- sporksmith 4y ago
  The spec documents linked from there are the most canonical documentation, though the gitweb link will probably be deprecated soon in favor of gitlab. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec As always it's probably a good idea to reach out to chat about what you have in mind before getting too far with implementation. #tor-dev on OFTC IRC (bridged to Matrix) https://www.torproject.org/contact/ https://www.torproject.org/contact/ https://blog.torproject.org/entering-the-matrix/ https://blog.torproject.org/entering-the-matrix/
hda2 4y ago
Excellent write up! How well would the new congestion controls be able to handle udp traffic from aggressively opportunistic protocols like bittorrent over UDP, assuming that datagram traffic is allowed on the tor network? As far as I know, bittorrent's udp congestion control assumes the network is able to drop packets and clients definitely act accordingly.
- sporksmith 4y ago
  UDP is currently not supported, but we're working on a design for it now https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/proposals/339-udp-over-tor.md https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/p...

throwaway202205 4y ago

Thanks for working on Tor! Slightly off-topic but do you have any pointer for someone who would like to help optimizing Tor? The current documents portal [1] has a big "OUTDATED" banner attached, and the WIP new portal contains too little information for me to make sense of how Tor works internally. I worked on some areas of TBB before, but still feel like I don't know enough about Tor's internal. [1]: https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/documentation#DesignDoc https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/documentation#DesignDoc

sporksmith 4y ago
The spec documents linked from there are the most canonical documentation, though the gitweb link will probably be deprecated soon in favor of gitlab. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec As always it's probably a good idea to reach out to chat about what you have in mind before getting too far with implementation. #tor-dev on OFTC IRC (bridged to Matrix) https://www.torproject.org/contact/ https://www.torproject.org/contact/ https://blog.torproject.org/entering-the-matrix/ https://blog.torproject.org/entering-the-matrix/

hda2 4y ago

Excellent write up! How well would the new congestion controls be able to handle udp traffic from aggressively opportunistic protocols like bittorrent over UDP, assuming that datagram traffic is allowed on the tor network? As far as I know, bittorrent's udp congestion control assumes the network is able to drop packets and clients definitely act accordingly.

sporksmith 4y ago
UDP is currently not supported, but we're working on a design for it now https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/proposals/339-udp-over-tor.md https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/p...