twister-core 0.9.22: Tor support available

We have just reached an important milestone: twister is now compatible with Tor!

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As some people may be aware, the blocking issue from Tor compatibility was the DHT part. Because our DHT requires UDP and Tor doesn’t support it (and I’d guess it may probably never implement such thing) that was pretty much a showstopper.

Still, running twister on top of Tor was a long time goal. As discussed in the white paper ( /?attachment_id=355 ), the Tor support allows a far more interesting threat model.

The solution was to implement the routing of the DHT traffic through other twister peers. As we already have an unstructured TCP-based P2P overlay network derived from the Bitcoin protocol, I have just extended this protocol with the new DHT relaying commands.

So, a few minutes ago, I’ve been able to successfully run twister over Tor for the first time, with all functionality. That includes downloading the blockchain, using DHT to obtain posts, profiles, avatars and the swarm peer lists from trackers, and also synchronizing post’s torrents. All the 3 network overlays were tunneled by the Tor socks5 proxy.

In order to try this feature just add the “-proxy=127.0.0.1″ argument to twisterd command line (assuming your Tor daemon is running on localhost with port 9050).

It might take some time to reach a few relaying nodes though. This is probably going to improve over the next few days as people update their twister clients.