[guardian-dev] Question about Orbot and Tor Path Selection

[Michael Rogers]

On 16/05/17 21:34, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 11, 2017, at 02:39 PM, Kevin Gallagher wrote:
>> Please forgive me if this is not the correct place for this question. I
>> was wondering if Orbot checked for network connectivity every time it
>> attempts to build a Tor circuit or poll entry nodes. 
> 
> Orbot does put the Tor daemon to sleep when there is no network
> connectivity. This is a Tor Control Port feature that was added
> specifically for Orbot/mobile devices.

We recently noticed that if Android fails to detect a loss of network
connectivity (for example, if a wifi router is disconnected from the
internet), Tor will repeatedly try and fail to connect to guard nodes as
Kevin suggested. The behaviour seems to be device-specific, perhaps
because devices differ as to whether and how quickly they detect
connectivity losses.

As a workaround, we're considering counting guard connection failure
events and setting DisableNetwork 1 until the next connectivity event if
the failures exceed some threshold. Here's the ticket:

https://code.briarproject.org/akwizgran/briar/issues/950

Cheers,
Michael
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