Sunny King: The other is to proxy your minting node behind tor
Ben: For the second mitigation strategy, we, the community, can help educate people about setting up Tor and enabling the proxy settings on their wallet client
I’m planning on writing a complete guide to minting, aimed at newcomers. Minting with tor will be an optional extra part of the guide for those who are particularly security-conscious. However, I am not very familiar with tor as I have never used it. Is anyone able to help out?
This is a long-term goal, because the implementation may be more difficult in practice than anticipated, but we’ve discussed making Peerunity (or a version of it) that defaults to running the connection through a Tor proxy.
Here’s my primary concern, however, with a node running Tor, is it possible to use UPNPC? Would it be an active connection, or would it actually be hidden from the the network and only act as a broadcasting node?
I have an “Onion Pi” – a Raspberry Pi running as a Tor wifi service, see the link that Sandakersmann included above – running at my house. I haven’t done extensive testing yet with it, but as part of my on-going Peerunity and Peershares testing, I’m going to start to use it as a separate testing environment and I’ll post updates and things that I learn. As part of that, I expect that I’ll include a guide for setting it up, and will be working with SirCoinGame and Pennybreaker (as they have time) to see if there is a way that we can script the setup of the service in such a way that others can use the script (in a provably safe and secure manner, obviously).
If anyone else beats me to it, I’m also happy to evaluate what you’ve created, because it would likely expedite my own work, so, as they say, “The more, the merrier!”
Run a full node (or better, several full nodes) that is connected to the network directly-- not via Tor.
But to keep your transactions private, you broadcast them through a Tor-connected SPV (not full) node. If you are mining, broadcast new blocks the same way.
That gives you fully-validating-node security plus transaction/block privacy. You could run both the full node and the SPV-Tor-connected node on a machine at home; to the rest of the network your home IP address would look like a relay node that never generated any transactions or blocks.
If you live in a country where even just connecting to the Bitcoin network is illegal (or would draw unwelcome attention to yourself), then you’d need to pay for a server somewhere else and administer it via Tor.
Peerbox will have “on/off” switch for Tor network, that is piece of cake. But I have some concerns. Users must understand that if you are connected to Tor network, you can not be connected to regular network. It black or white, Tor or regular.
There are some coins who operate via Tor, but I do not think any mix with regular internet. What could happen with Tor is that you can not find anyone on Tor network since nobody uses it or chain forks and users on Tor continue on wrong chain.
I just came by this thread. I’ve written a a guide on running a full node behind TOR and could improve on it to add minting behind TOR instructions as well … It’s still a draft but would very much appreciate your input on the idea.
[quote=“Ben, post:4, topic:2521”]This is a long-term goal, because the implementation may be more difficult in practice than anticipated, but we’ve discussed making Peerunity (or a version of it) that defaults to running the connection through a Tor proxy.
Here’s my primary concern, however, with a node running Tor, is it possible to use UPNPC? Would it be an active connection, or would it actually be hidden from the the network and only act as a broadcasting node?[/quote]
Hey Ben, I’ve been running my peerunity client behind since the release of V 0.1.0 and never had problems with it. So i guess it’s working? It’s connecting to other nodes and syncing normally and tested spending also. Not sure what UPNPC is lol but my node has been functional so far. I only used the provided features of the client without modifications to the code so it was easy to setup. If you wanted to make it run by default behind tor, can’t you just put together a peercoin.conf that has those options already put together and unless the user explicitly changes them, they will always run behind tor ? Maybe I’m simplifying too much… I hope this makes sense
as per my previous post, I’ve just attempted running a full node behind tor using the guide I put together. I’ll monitor it’s health and see what happens.
