[guardian-dev] Thali, Orbot and requests for help

[Yaron Goland]

Um... anyone?


________________________________
From: Yaron Goland
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2014 4:18 PM
To: guardian-dev at lists.mayfirst.org
Subject: Thali, Orbot and requests for help


I'm going to make the wacky assumption that many people on this list are also on Tor Talk so rather than waste more electrons I'll just link to my introduction for Thali that I posted there - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-May/033112.html


A core part of Thali is that we run a background service on Android called the Thali Device Hub (TDH). The TDH is really just an embedded CouchDB server that accepts connections over mutual SSL auth and has some fun ACL logic, battery management and other logic. But the TDH is intended to be reached as a Tor hidden service.


I started to work with Orbot and ran into some issues I really need help with.


Issue #1 - How do I programmatically find the hidden service's name? - Near as I can tell there is no way for the TDH to programmatically figure out what the local hidden service's name is. I looked at NetCipher/OrbotHelper.java and I don't see any mechanism to retrieve the hidden service's .onion address. I dug around the Orbot code a bit and I could only find the hidden service name accessed via a shared preference stored in Orbot's context. I couldn't actually find a programmatic way for the TDH to ask for the hidden service name. The best I can come up with right now is to ask the user to please go over to Orbot and copy the onion name and paste it in the TDH. Obviously that isn't the best user experience so I figure I'm just slow and not finding the right way.


Issue #2 - How does Orbot handle multiple hidden services? - Ideally we would live in a happy world where people can easily run a hidden service where and when necessary and appropriate. So this means that different apps could run their own hidden services without interfering with each other. But right now it looks like Orbot only supports having a single hidden service mapped to a single port on the whole handset. So if there are two apps that need hidden services then I guess who ever asks first wins? Is this by design or am I missing something?


Thanks!


            Yaron

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