[guardian-dev] Thali, Orbot and requests for help
Yaron Goland
yarong at microsoft.com
Wed Jun 4 20:28:51 EDT 2014
Sigh... it returns it in the line nResult.putExtra("hs_host", onionHostname); in Orbot.java. Sorry for not seeing that. :(
Ideally I think we would like to just embed. Is there any plan to break TorServiceLibrary into an AAR? Or should we just cage off of Briar?
Thanks and sorry for completely missing the result intent. :(
Yaron
________________________________________
From: Nathan of Guardian <nathan at guardianproject.info>
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2014 3:51 PM
To: Yaron Goland; guardian-dev at lists.mayfirst.org
Subject: Re: [guardian-dev] Thali, Orbot and requests for help
On 06/04/2014 06:23 PM, Yaron Goland wrote:
> the code seems to say is that if we use Orbot our experience will be:
>
> 1) Our app will use helper to see if Orbot is there, if not, use Helper to get the user to install Orbot.
> 2) Send Orbot the start HS service intent with our port
> 3) Have the user get a UX asking them to confirm from Orbot
> 4) Ask the user if they could please go to Orbot and look up the hidden service address and maybe copy and paste it into some field for us since there doesn't appear to be a programmatic way to get at it from our app (within Orbot's code I can see pref_hs_hostname and getHiddenServiceHostname but those aren't available remotely)
I believe that you can request the hidden service hostname via Intent
and/or you can get it as a response to your original request. Let me
check the code to be sure.
> 5) Hope that no other app starts the hidden service since it would take away our hidden service
There can be multiple hidden services running, as long as they are on
separate ports. Orbot supports this by using comma-separate port values.
> I hope you can see why this isn't exactly the experience we are looking for.
Of course, I understand. This is also why apps like Briar have decided
to use the Tor binary and some of our service/controller code directly
in their own apps, so they can have more direct control, and no external
dependencies.
>
> But the real question is - what does Orbot want to do?
> Does it want to remain a stand alone APK and provide some kind of more sophisticated intents based system to allow services to start and stop their own hidden services without interfering with each other or requiring user permission and support discovering the hidden service address their app has been assigned?
> Does it want to become a library that apps can include and get provided with Tor functionality directly? I realize that something like Orchid can handle the client side of this but so far I haven't found anything outside of the Tor binary that handles hosting hidden services.
We want to, and are already doing both. I think if we separate our the
Tor core bits into a TorServiceLibrary project, that Orbot uses, that
would make it more clear for all. For now, you should feel free to use
Tor directly for your needs, and/or work with us to improve our Intents
API while we are in our v14 alpha stage.
For the foreseeable future, we will provide Orbot for the mass market
use cases for basic web, twitter, chat proxying/circumvention.
Best,
Nathan
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