Alexander FærøySponsor 69
Project Title: Walking Onions: Scaling & Saving Bandwidth on the Tor Network
Project Period: March 1, 2020 - May 1, 2020
Project Goals/Activities
Demand on the Tor network is increasing. Changing Tor’s design to accommodate spikes in users & third-party implementations is a critical next step.
In this project, we will implement the the first phase of the Walking Onions proposal, a set of protocols improving scalability for the Tor network by enabling constant-size scaling of the information each user must download. Walking Onions will allow us to remove nearly all directory overhead from the Tor protocol, enabling Tor to scale to many more clients and relays, with no reduction in security.
This Objective is a complete, byte-level specification of the Walking Onions design, in sufficient detail to permit independent implementations of Walking Onions to interoperate. This will include a description of all new directory formats, all new wire protocols, all new client and relay behaviors, and all backward compatibility mechanisms.
Activities:
- Write an initial draft of specification, identifying unknowns and options in the design.
- Distribute draft to tor-dev mailing list and to researchers for comment.
- Take decisions on all unknowns and options; if uncertainty remains.
- Write or locate reference-implementations for any primitive operations not already used by Tor.
- Write reference implementations for all novel encodings/decodings.
Teams involved:
- network team
- research director
Project Tracking
TicketQuery(sponsor=~Sponsor69,format=progress)
Tickets by objective and activity
Objective 1: Specification
Objective 1 is a complete, byte-level specification of the Walking Onions design, in sufficient detail to permit independent implementations of Walking Onions to interoperate. This will include a description of all new directory formats, all new wire protocols, all new client and relay behaviors, and all backward compatibility mechanisms.
Activities:
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Write an initial draft of specification, identifying unknowns and options in the design (if any are found). Work in progress in https://github.com/nmathewson/walking-onions-wip
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Distribute draft to tor-dev mailing list and to researchers for comment.
-
Take decisions on all unknowns and options; if uncertainty remains.
-
Write or locate reference-implementations for any primitive operations not already used by Tor.
-
Write reference implementations for all novel encodings/decodings.