[observationist]

Could you use tor to establish a better realtime link using a different protocol like Veilid while maintaining the relative anonymity and security?

edit: https://veilid.com/

Added link for clarity. Seems like you could get more or less realtime, udp streaming, full duplex communication . Once you have the first part of that built, then adding things like voip or video calls or what have you becomes a lot easier.

[smalltorch]

The problem is the UDP packets from the application will ultimately be in a TCP wrapper over tor. Which will add even more latency.

I know you can set up mumble over Tor but it's going to have the same latency drawbacks.

Another commenter noted the ability to configure only 1 hop instead of the standard 3. I wonder how much latency would be gained back. I want to play around with this.

[observationist]

Sorry if I was unclear, this stuff does get tangled, lol. I was talking about setting up a parallel veilid connection - a private route exchange between the two ends that goes straight over the veilid network, outside of tor. It's got comparable privacy and security assurance. There only a few thousand nodes/peers right now, but it's gaining steam.

You could use tor to anchor a common relay, then do key and route exchange to establish veilid, then the realtime app uses that for a very secure private route unique to the two endpoints.

From what I can tell, because of the design, veilid would be excellent, comparable to many commercial voip offerings, with 150-500ms latency . More nodes and users would quickly ramp that up. There are a ton of downstream benefits of something like this; faster file exchange for ipfs, bittorent, etc, that doesn't gum up the tor layer, a kind of implicit defense in depth, but also low latency, efficient peer to peer routing.

It'd almost be zero knowledge by construction; you could build a multi-hop escrow style key exchange.

If Musk integrated tor relays and veilid peers throughout Starlink, you could get near-native latency for wherever you connect in the world, more than enough to add timing attack noise and layer in other security features.