Channels/Tor
How to use Tor for privacy while interacting with channels
Limitations
- Does not make the Snowblossom side use tor. Your node will connect to the normal snowblossom network and appear to be a snowblossom node or client.
- Using SOCKS5 proxy via browser into Channels for access to *.snowblossom.io sites allows the browser to connect to other sites as well (channels will proxy any non-snowblossom.io sites as a normal proxy would). This does not yet use Tor, so a web site that references other resources will leak data.
Steps
Due to gRPC not supporting SOCKS5 (yet https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/issues/6613) we need to the the tor HTTP Proxy port, rather than the normal SOCKS5 proxy.
With linux tor or tor browser, the step is the same, find torrc and add:
HTTPTunnelPort 9080
- Then enable the tor http proxy option.
- Enable tor_only
- Restart Channels
Tor only mode disables:
- Discovery of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses
- Multicast discovery and announcement for local peers
- Advertising and IPv4 or IPv6 addresses in the DHT
- IPv4 UPNP NAT registration
Tor only mode will:
- Only connect out via tor, but will connect to IPv4, IPv6 and .onion (hidden service) hosts via tor
