Re: [tor-dev] Alternative Implementations of Tor

2016-08-29 Thread Nick Mathewson 
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Alexander Færøy  wrote:

Hi, and sorry for the delay! It's a crazy week here. :)

> I'm writing this email to receive suggestions, comments, and possibly
> creative ideas about the following:
>
> 1. What is the general criteria set from the Tor project's perspective
>on when it is acceptable to make alternative Tor implementations
>available to the general public?
>
>I'm currently testing Talla using Chutney with a mixture of NTOR and
>pre-NTOR Tor daemons running (inspired by one of the configuration
>files in the Chutney repository, which referred to a 'tor-old'
>binary).
>
>My current plan is to stabilize Talla further until my gut feeling is
>that I can try to announce a single, middle, relay to the production
>Tor network. This relay will, of course, have a platform-string set
>to something easily identifiable like "Talla 0.0.1 (...)" and the
>contact-string set to a valid method of reaching out to me with, in
>its announced server descriptor. I will closely monitor that things
>are going as I expect and probably turn it off shortly after the
>test, when I have seen that my code isn't too "crashy" -- this will
>most likely be repeated a number of times until I'm satisfied with
>the results.
>
>Could I do more to ensure that the people caring for the network as a
>whole wont fear me pressing the start-button here?

Sounds like a start!


As for advertising stuff in server descriptors, we're moving towards a
new way to advertise support for the different sub-protocols that make
up the Tor network. I hope that we'll merge it some time over the next
month. Please see ticket 19958 and proposal 264 for more information.
I'd especially like any comments you can give, from your perspective,
before we finalize the design and implementation.



> 2. I will not do any classical releases (as in packagable .tar.gz) until
>I'm past the point where my gut feelings are telling me that my code is
>reasonably stable for the production network of Tor.
>
>I will, in a very visible location, request that no distribution
>developers makes any packages of the code until there is a release.
>
>I think this is already the norm, but I guess being explicit won't
>hurt.
>
> 3. I will write, also in a visible location, a warning that the code is
>not production ready and that people should probably stick to running a
>Tor relay using the official Tor daemon and point to the installation
>instructions on torproject.org.

I think that's a good start too!  I'd recommend that everybody who is
doing any kind of new cryptography system put a big warning on the
early versions this way.

Thanks again for doing this work; it looks exciting!
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Re: [tor-dev] Alternative Implementations of Tor

2016-08-18 Thread George Kadianakis 
Alexander Færøy  writes:

> [ text/plain ]
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA512
>
> Hello.
>
> Over the past year I've been hacking, on and off, on an implementation
> of Tor in the Erlang programming language. The project started out after
> I met Linus Nordberg at the Erlang User Conference in the summer of 2015
> - -- a couple of weeks before the CCC Camp in Germany. Linus and I
> discussed what it would take to get a very basic implementation of a Tor
> relay up and running in Erlang.
>
> The project has been named Talla, which is still open for change --
> especially if it collides with an already established project within the
> wider Tor development community. I was unable to find any name clashes
> myself, but I may very well have overlooked something.
>
> The parts of Talla that is implemented in "pure" Erlang is going to be
> licensed under a two-clause BSD license. Talla also contains a "module"
> which is using Tor's ed25519 ref10 implementation (Thanks to Yawning for
> a great amount of help there) -- that module is licensed under the same
> license as Tor itself.
>
> I'm now at the point where things are slowly starting to take form. The
> important pieces of the code have so far been kept available only to a
> tiny group of close friends that I trust not to share the code until I,
> and possibly other people, considers that the code is stable enough for
> the wilderness of the wider internet.
>
> There is, to my knowledge, currently only one implementation of Tor that
> is actively in use on the production network, which is the C
> implementation. I'm aware of a Haskell implementation made by Galois,
> which to me mostly seemed like it was designed to be building blocks for
> writing more specialized clients and doing research with the Tor
> network. Last time I looked, the Haskell implementation's main function
> was doing a DNS lookup through a circuit within the Tor network and then
> quitting. I was also told there had been an implementation in Go that
> have had activity on the production network, but that project was
> abandoned by its maintainer.
>
> In general I'm a bit uncertain about the "best practices" of dealing with a
> third party Tor implementation, which Talla is.
>
> I'm writing this email to receive suggestions, comments, and possibly
> creative ideas about the following:
>
> 1. What is the general criteria set from the Tor project's perspective
>on when it is acceptable to make alternative Tor implementations
>available to the general public?
>
>I'm currently testing Talla using Chutney with a mixture of NTOR and
>pre-NTOR Tor daemons running (inspired by one of the configuration
>files in the Chutney repository, which referred to a 'tor-old'
>binary).
>
>My current plan is to stabilize Talla further until my gut feeling is
>that I can try to announce a single, middle, relay to the production
>Tor network. This relay will, of course, have a platform-string set
>to something easily identifiable like "Talla 0.0.1 (...)" and the
>contact-string set to a valid method of reaching out to me with, in
>its announced server descriptor. I will closely monitor that things
>are going as I expect and probably turn it off shortly after the
>test, when I have seen that my code isn't too "crashy" -- this will
>most likely be repeated a number of times until I'm satisfied with
>the results.
>
>Could I do more to ensure that the people caring for the network as a
>whole wont fear me pressing the start-button here?
>
> 2. I will not do any classical releases (as in packagable .tar.gz) until
>I'm past the point where my gut feelings are telling me that my code is
>reasonably stable for the production network of Tor.
>
>I will, in a very visible location, request that no distribution
>developers makes any packages of the code until there is a release.
>
>I think this is already the norm, but I guess being explicit won't
>hurt.
>
> 3. I will write, also in a visible location, a warning that the code is
>not production ready and that people should probably stick to running a
>Tor relay using the official Tor daemon and point to the installation
>instructions on torproject.org.
>
> 4. Not have any installation documentation and hope that Erlang is still
>an esoteric enough language to make people pass by without trying :-)
>
> 5. Talla will not have any references to the directory authorities that
>are currently used for the Tor production network. This means that
>anyone who is interested in running Talla will have to explicitly set
>the directory authority servers in Talla's configuration file.
>
>This will allow people who want to toy around with it together with
>Chutney to be easily able to do that.
>
> Why am I asking all these questions now, when I could just wait until
> Talla is ready? In two weeks there will be a smaller

Re: [tor-dev] Alternative Implementations of Tor

2016-08-17 Thread grarpamp 
Add your projects here...

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ListOfTorImplementations
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Re: [tor-dev] Alternative Implementations of Tor

2016-08-17 Thread teor 

> On 18 Aug 2016, at 05:23, Nathan Freitas  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2016, at 11:01 AM, Alexander Færøy wrote:
>> There is, to my knowledge, currently only one implementation of Tor that
>> is actively in use on the production network, which is the C
>> implementation. I'm aware of a Haskell implementation made by Galois,
> 
> Not sure how widely implemented it is, but Orchid was a formally
> implemented version of Tor in Java, by the Toronto-based Subgraph group:
> https://subgraph.com/orchid/index.en.html
> 
> It was, at one point, integrated into the Martus human rights
> documentation platform.
> 
> The developers are likely on this list, or if not, easily reachable to
> ask for any lessons learned.

Tor uses the version in the platform string to detect features, so some 
alternative implementations claim to be a particular Tor version.
Other alternative implementations might not report a version at all.

At the moment, I see the following platforms reported on the network:

Tor 0.2.4.19 on Windows XP,65833
...
Tor 0.2.9.1-alpha-dev on OpenBSD,1928192
node-Tor 0.1.0 on Linux x86_64,168444

So it appears that node-Tor is still going strong. And everything else just 
wants to blend in.

A stem script to generate the full list is:

-

import sys
from stem.descriptor.remote import DescriptorDownloader

def get_bw_to_platform():
  bw_to_platform = {}
  downloader = DescriptorDownloader()
  try:
for desc in downloader.get_server_descriptors().run():
  if bw_to_platform.has_key(desc.platform):
bw_to_platform[desc.platform] += desc.observed_bandwidth
  else:
bw_to_platform[desc.platform] = desc.observed_bandwidth
  except Exception as exc:
print("Unable to retrieve the server descriptors: %s" % exc)
  return bw_to_platform

bw_to_platform = get_bw_to_platform()
for platform in sorted(bw_to_platform.keys()):
  print("%s,%i" % (platform, bw_to_platform[platform]))

-

Tim

Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)

teor2345 at gmail dot com
PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B
ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n
xmpp: teor at torproject dot org








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Re: [tor-dev] Alternative Implementations of Tor

2016-08-17 Thread Nathan Freitas 
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016, at 11:01 AM, Alexander Færøy wrote:
> There is, to my knowledge, currently only one implementation of Tor that
> is actively in use on the production network, which is the C
> implementation. I'm aware of a Haskell implementation made by Galois,

Not sure how widely implemented it is, but Orchid was a formally
implemented version of Tor in Java, by the Toronto-based Subgraph group:
https://subgraph.com/orchid/index.en.html

It was, at one point, integrated into the Martus human rights
documentation platform.

The developers are likely on this list, or if not, easily reachable to
ask for any lessons learned.

+n
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[tor-dev] Alternative Implementations of Tor

2016-08-17 Thread Alexander Færøy 
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA512

Hello.

Over the past year I've been hacking, on and off, on an implementation
of Tor in the Erlang programming language. The project started out after
I met Linus Nordberg at the Erlang User Conference in the summer of 2015
- -- a couple of weeks before the CCC Camp in Germany. Linus and I
discussed what it would take to get a very basic implementation of a Tor
relay up and running in Erlang.

The project has been named Talla, which is still open for change --
especially if it collides with an already established project within the
wider Tor development community. I was unable to find any name clashes
myself, but I may very well have overlooked something.

The parts of Talla that is implemented in "pure" Erlang is going to be
licensed under a two-clause BSD license. Talla also contains a "module"
which is using Tor's ed25519 ref10 implementation (Thanks to Yawning for
a great amount of help there) -- that module is licensed under the same
license as Tor itself.

I'm now at the point where things are slowly starting to take form. The
important pieces of the code have so far been kept available only to a
tiny group of close friends that I trust not to share the code until I,
and possibly other people, considers that the code is stable enough for
the wilderness of the wider internet.

There is, to my knowledge, currently only one implementation of Tor that
is actively in use on the production network, which is the C
implementation. I'm aware of a Haskell implementation made by Galois,
which to me mostly seemed like it was designed to be building blocks for
writing more specialized clients and doing research with the Tor
network. Last time I looked, the Haskell implementation's main function
was doing a DNS lookup through a circuit within the Tor network and then
quitting. I was also told there had been an implementation in Go that
have had activity on the production network, but that project was
abandoned by its maintainer.

In general I'm a bit uncertain about the "best practices" of dealing with a
third party Tor implementation, which Talla is.

I'm writing this email to receive suggestions, comments, and possibly
creative ideas about the following:

1. What is the general criteria set from the Tor project's perspective
   on when it is acceptable to make alternative Tor implementations
   available to the general public?

   I'm currently testing Talla using Chutney with a mixture of NTOR and
   pre-NTOR Tor daemons running (inspired by one of the configuration
   files in the Chutney repository, which referred to a 'tor-old'
   binary).

   My current plan is to stabilize Talla further until my gut feeling is
   that I can try to announce a single, middle, relay to the production
   Tor network. This relay will, of course, have a platform-string set
   to something easily identifiable like "Talla 0.0.1 (...)" and the
   contact-string set to a valid method of reaching out to me with, in
   its announced server descriptor. I will closely monitor that things
   are going as I expect and probably turn it off shortly after the
   test, when I have seen that my code isn't too "crashy" -- this will
   most likely be repeated a number of times until I'm satisfied with
   the results.

   Could I do more to ensure that the people caring for the network as a
   whole wont fear me pressing the start-button here?

2. I will not do any classical releases (as in packagable .tar.gz) until
   I'm past the point where my gut feelings are telling me that my code is
   reasonably stable for the production network of Tor.

   I will, in a very visible location, request that no distribution
   developers makes any packages of the code until there is a release.

   I think this is already the norm, but I guess being explicit won't
   hurt.

3. I will write, also in a visible location, a warning that the code is
   not production ready and that people should probably stick to running a
   Tor relay using the official Tor daemon and point to the installation
   instructions on torproject.org.

4. Not have any installation documentation and hope that Erlang is still
   an esoteric enough language to make people pass by without trying :-)

5. Talla will not have any references to the directory authorities that
   are currently used for the Tor production network. This means that
   anyone who is interested in running Talla will have to explicitly set
   the directory authority servers in Talla's configuration file.

   This will allow people who want to toy around with it together with
   Chutney to be easily able to do that.

Why am I asking all these questions now, when I could just wait until
Talla is ready? In two weeks there will be a smaller hacker camp in
Denmark, named BornHack, where I was planning on giving a talk on the
development of Talla, the design of the Erlang application, some of the
many refactoring periods there have been, general information about how
Tor