7
votes
Accepted
How do clients know if a descriptor is new/changed/or disappeared from the Tor network?
Tor maintains a descriptor store which keeps all the descriptors it knows about. New descriptors enter the store after being downloaded, old descriptors get expired when they haven't been referenced ...
- 2,209
4
votes
Suddenly my Tor hidden service isn't available
Ok, I figured this out. For some reason the custom onion address I made with Shallot was no longer working. I made a new hidden service and got rid of the existing one, restarted Tor, and voila! I'm ...
- 41
3
votes
Accepted
Do Tor Clients and Caches download the WHOLE totally new consensus file every one hour, or just update some lines in the file every 10 seconds?
Good and detailed question, but you're misunderstanding a key point about descriptors. A descriptor doesn't change, once you've downloaded it you don't update it. This is guaranteed by using hashes - ...
- 2,209
3
votes
End-to-End encryption using hidden services
A Tor onion service host chooses several Tor nodes to serve as the host's introduction points. The host builds circuits to those nodes, and tells the nodes to use those circuits to forward ...
- 122
3
votes
Accepted
How many times does client fetch the consensus file from directory authorities?
As far as I see it the answer is in the source code. ;-)
The file main.c has a function run_scheduled_events. The comment to this function says:
Perform regular maintenance tasks. This function ...
- 8,693
2
votes
How many times does client fetch the consensus file from directory authorities?
From what I gathered, I have not found anything that point that a client periodically fetch the consensus file. On the other hand, consensus files do expire, and when that happens the client will ...
- 1,195
2
votes
Accepted
Does all direct clients have to talk to Directory Authorities to fetch the consensus at the first step?
Every client that doesn't get its consensus from some other source (clients that use bridges get theirs from the bridge they connect to) will have to connect to the Directory Authorities once at first ...
- 2,209
2
votes
Entry guards and multiple Tor clients
TL;DR The answer will depend on what you consider important, and what your Tor use-case is. (Similar to the hand-waving over threat models mentioned in another answer.)
However, in general, the ...
- 3,125
2
votes
Usage if I don't need anonymity but want to help others?
(Just to add to the other answers with one that's possibly quite simplistic and obvious... )
So should users like me (who are personally not bothered about
anonymity) follow different ...
- 3,125
2
votes
Usage if I don't need anonymity but want to help others?
Running a relay is a great start if you have the resources, but using Tor for at least some of your daily browsing does help make Tor traffic look more "normal" indeed.
If websites see more of their ...
- 2,910
2
votes
How TBB commands tor to use a "New Circuit for this Site"?
Short: it does not send a command. It creates new connection to SocksPort, using different credentials, and sends new requests to domain through it.
Details:
Tor do isolates streams to different ...
- 31
2
votes
Accepted
Sending a request over Tor without binding port on localhost
If you plan on using the standard tor implementation, then yes you will need to use some form of local proxy. If you don't want to bind the SOCKS port to a localhost address, you can also use a unix ...
- 3,002
2
votes
Accepted
Determining circuit tor client is using
Tor clients keep a pool of circuits and may use several circuits simultaneously for streams depending on factors such as exit policies, stream isolation, etc. So there is generally not a single "...
- 3,002
1
vote
Accepted
How to correctly read the control port when Tor is started with `--ControlPort auto --ControlPortWriteToFile <TEMPORARY_PATH>`?
Nick Mathewson answered the question here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40386#note_2735298
That sounds plausible to me. I'd suggest adding a step 0: make sure that the path is ...
- 53
1
vote
Accepted
Linux tor.service fails with "Unable to raise RLIMIT_MEMLOCK" at boot
The tor.service is normally run as a non-privileged process (i.e. the process' owner's UID is not 0). This is true unless (as is the case here) the flag DisableAllSwap is set to 1 (default is 0) in ...
- 111
1
vote
The scary torrc
First of all, backup your /etc/tor/torrc and revert to the original of something breaks.
cp /etc/tor/torrc/ /etc/tor/torrc.backup
All of the rest is in the manual.
Exit nodes:
ExitNodes node,...
- 2,224
1
vote
Accepted
how to find onion websites?
https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/ has a large number of them. Make sure to read the sidebar for a list of search engines. You can find all contributed onion services here.
The Tor project's own onion ...
- 2,224
1
vote
Accepted
Tor Client limit bandwidth
You can find this in the manual...
There are tons of different handlers against bandwidth, as client-node, the same as a relay-node...
e.g.
GENERAL OPTIONS
BandwidthRate N bytes|KBytes|...
1
vote
Updating api for third-party developers
For Tor Browser there are various ways to check what the latest Tor Browser version is:
The Firefox updater uses this XML file to determine if there is an update available (note that the URL is ...
- 10.9k
1
vote
Accepted
Import a SSL Client Certificate into the Tor Browser
I think this is a known bug. See: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14269
- 186
1
vote
How many clients are typically using Tor simultaneously? How many circuits are simultaneously in use?
You will be very interested in a document on the tor metrics website that explains the collected data further. Please let me know if there is anything missing there, and I'll try and improve this ...
- 2,209
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible