Add an onion transport

[tomaka]

[shivankgarg98]

Hello @tomaka @gnunicorn ! I'm resolving this issue.

[umgefahren]

Is it revolved?

I think it could be implemented quite easily with the tor_stream crate. However this seems rather inelegant, because it relies on a running Tor Proxy in the background. I would wait for a mature version of Arti. This would be more cross platform and probably more performant. However doing this now would be quite a hassle, because Arti will probably change it‘s API a lot.

[thomaseizinger]

We have experimented with libp2p and Tor a lot and landed on the following:

1. It is quite easy to do a dial-only transport: https://github.com/comit-network/xmr-btc-swap/blob/master/swap/src/network/tor_transport.rs
2. In our experience, Tor users want to manage their Tor daemon and onion addresses themselves. Thus, if I had to integrate a libp2p application with Tor again, I would give them tools to easily setup a hidden services and build a libp2p transport that reads the Tor configuration file and automatically listens on the respective TCP port to receive data.

[olanod]

Perhaps relevant https://blog.torproject.org/arti_100_released the Tor project released Arti v1, their new Rust based Tor implementation.

[thomaseizinger]

Perhaps relevant blog.torproject.org/arti_100_released the Tor project released Arti v1, their new Rust based Tor implementation.

That is big news indeed. Reading through the blogpost under the "What's coming next?" section, it says that onion services will come with arti version 1.2.0. Listening will require the creation of an onion service so we will have to wait for that to build a full fledged transport.

It should be possible to build one that can only dial a Tor address though and simply fail unconditionally for listening. PRs welcome :)

[umgefahren]

I started working on this, however I have issues dealing with Multiaddress correctly. As far as I can tell Multiaddress comes with some support for Onion out of the box, but it's somewhat opaque what this means in terms of Arti's TorAddress.

For now I just extract a SocketAddr (using TCP for the port), since Onion services are not supported anyway.

[thomaseizinger]

I started working on this, however I have issues dealing with Multiaddress correctly. As far as I can tell Multiaddress comes with some support for Onion out of the box, but it's somewhat opaque what this means in terms of Arti's TorAddress.

For now I just extract a SocketAddr (using TCP for the port), since Onion services are not supported anyway.

Thank you for picking this up!

Feel free to open a draft PR at any stage if you want to discuss concrete issues :)

[thomaseizinger]

We now have https://github.com/umgefahren/libp2p-tor.

[tcharding]

Hi,

I'm filing a RustSec advisory [0] signalling that https://crates.io/crates/libp2p-tokio-socks5 is unmaintained. Its been suggested that we link to alternatives. Shall I link to https://crates.io/crates/libp2p-community-tor?

@thomaseizinger was there any technical reason that you remember why you didn't mention libp2p-tokio-socks5 in this thread but instead referenced the xmr-btc-swap code (although the code looks pretty similar at a glance)?

Thanks

[0] https://github.com/rustsec/advisory-db/pull/1932

[thomaseizinger]

@thomaseizinger was there any technical reason that you remember why you didn't mention libp2p-tokio-socks5 in this thread but instead referenced the xmr-btc-swap code (although the code looks pretty similar at a glance)?

I was never a fan of how listen_on is implemented there because it is somewhat of a leaky abstraction. The dial-only version I linked to is significantly simpler to understand.

[umgefahren]

Hi,

I'm filing a RustSec advisory [0] signalling that crates.io/crates/libp2p-tokio-socks5 is unmaintained. Its been suggested that we link to alternatives. Shall I link to crates.io/crates/libp2p-community-tor?

@thomaseizinger was there any technical reason that you remember why you didn't mention libp2p-tokio-socks5 in this thread but instead referenced the xmr-btc-swap code (although the code looks pretty similar at a glance)?

Thanks

[0] rustsec/advisory-db#1932

Hi, author of libp2p-community-tor here.

I want to point out, that I haven't maintained libp2p-community-tor as well, although I could. Additionally I want to point out that it's not a direct replacement, since it ships with the Tor "inside" and Arti is still not considered to be a full replacement for C-Tor.

If there is real interest here, I could continue maintainer ship here, but it would certainly help to get in touch with the stake holders here. @tcharding

[tcharding]

I've not got any thing to do with libp2p anymore and have no opinions on the matter. I'm happy to link to whatever in the advisory, I just didn't want to lead anyone in the wrong direction. How about we link to crates.io/crates/libp2p-community-tor and also to https://github.com/comit-network/xmr-btc-swap/blob/master/swap/src/network/tor_transport.rs and perhaps to this thread too?