Channels/Tor

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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