[pyre]

If you provide access to the website as a Tor hidden service, do you get some sort of unique ID for the computer connecting that can be banned? I don't know much about the Tor protocol, but if you're on the receiving end of packets that need a response, you need a way to address them back.

[mike-cardwell]

No, you do not get any such thing.

Basically, the client and the machine hosting the hidden service both connect to a rendevouz point and communicate via that. The connections to the rendevouz point are not direct. They are bounced through three nodes, with three layers of encryption, each node being able to peal off one layer before passing it on to the next.

This is why hidden services are pretty slow. Every packet has to be routed through 6 other machines, which each can be anywhere in the World.

[visarga]

It's bearable. I avoided Tor for years thinking it would be too slow. My mistake. You can even watch YouTube on it.

[mike-cardwell]

There is enough bandwidth. It is latency that is the problem. That's why stuff like streaming videos or downloading large files over hidden services works fine.

[lsakdfjow]

What must be done, and by who, to solve the latency issue? Can it be improved at all? It seems that more folks rnning relays and contributing bandwidth increases available bandwidth, but what can be done about latency, anything at all?

[mike-cardwell]

Somebody put it well on the tor-talk mailing list today:

"both the client and the hidden service establish a three hop circuit to the same tor relay, where the connections are joint, so hidden services will have even double the delay of normal tor traffic. If relays were homogeneous distributed among the globe, two random relays will be 1/4 earth circumference apart on average. This means that a round trip will have a speed of light delay of 12 hops * 10 000km each / 300 000 km/s speed of light. That's 400ms from finite speed of light. Switches, routers and relays along the way will add to that."

[supergirl]

Doesn't matter if his website is a hidden service or not. The communication between the website and the user is done through Tor relays, which are shared. There cannot be any unique ID tied to the user because that would break anonymity.

[pyre]

> Doesn't matter if his website is a hidden service or not.

Well, when it's not a hidden service, it's the exit node that gets to see the contents of the message before sending it (unless it's SSL of course) to the wider Internet. If there was a unique ID within the Tor network, no one on the wider Internet would be able to see it. My thought was that if you were connecting directly to a hidden service within the Tor network, there might be a unique ID. Sounds like even connecting to hidden services within the Tor network is done indirectly.