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authorRoger Dingledine <arma@torproject.org>2005-06-06 20:30:25 +0000
committerRoger Dingledine <arma@torproject.org>2005-06-06 20:30:25 +0000
commita92ff1c4e91c57750e76c0f8c4f98cbaf6e5d694 (patch)
tree0dad1396351179cece613d191338dd791c714f95 /doc/HACKING
parent51b5b808cb06febdfdf89ea0ef8eb50dc39b2f36 (diff)
downloadtor-a92ff1c4e91c57750e76c0f8c4f98cbaf6e5d694.tar
tor-a92ff1c4e91c57750e76c0f8c4f98cbaf6e5d694.tar.gz
blow away obsolete stuff
svn:r4324
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/HACKING')
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1 files changed, 2 insertions, 62 deletions
diff --git a/doc/HACKING b/doc/HACKING
index 504d6d142..969ac690c 100644
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+++ b/doc/HACKING
@@ -574,67 +574,7 @@ The pieces.
Streams are multiplexed over circuits.
Cells. Some connections, specifically OR and OP connections, speak
- "cells". This means that data over that connection is bundled into 256
- byte packets (8 bytes of header and 248 bytes of payload). Each cell has
+ "cells". This means that data over that connection is bundled into 512
+ byte packets (14 bytes of header and 498 bytes of payload). Each cell has
a type, or "command", which indicates what it's for.
-Robustness features.
-
-[XXX no longer up to date]
- Bandwidth throttling. Each cell-speaking connection has a maximum
- bandwidth it can use, as specified in the routers.or file. Bandwidth
- throttling can occur on both the sender side and the receiving side. If
- the LinkPadding option is on, the sending side sends cells at regularly
- spaced intervals (e.g., a connection with a bandwidth of 25600B/s would
- queue a cell every 10ms). The receiving side protects against misbehaving
- servers that send cells more frequently, by using a simple token bucket:
-
- Each connection has a token bucket with a specified capacity. Tokens are
- added to the bucket each second (when the bucket is full, new tokens
- are discarded.) Each token represents permission to receive one byte
- from the network --- to receive a byte, the connection must remove a
- token from the bucket. Thus if the bucket is empty, that connection must
- wait until more tokens arrive. The number of tokens we add enforces a
- longterm average rate of incoming bytes, yet we still permit short-term
- bursts above the allowed bandwidth. Currently bucket sizes are set to
- ten seconds worth of traffic.
-
- The bandwidth throttling uses TCP to push back when we stop reading.
- We extend it with token buckets to allow more flexibility for traffic
- bursts.
-
- Data congestion control. Even with the above bandwidth throttling,
- we still need to worry about congestion, either accidental or intentional.
- If a lot of people make circuits into same node, and they all come out
- through the same connection, then that connection may become saturated
- (be unable to send out data cells as quickly as it wants to). An adversary
- can make a 'put' request through the onion routing network to a webserver
- he owns, and then refuse to read any of the bytes at the webserver end
- of the circuit. These bottlenecks can propagate back through the entire
- network, mucking up everything.
-
- (See the tor-spec.txt document for details of how congestion control
- works.)
-
- In practice, all the nodes in the circuit maintain a receive window
- close to maximum except the exit node, which stays around 0, periodically
- receiving a sendme and reading more data cells from the webserver.
- In this way we can use pretty much all of the available bandwidth for
- data, but gracefully back off when faced with multiple circuits (a new
- sendme arrives only after some cells have traversed the entire network),
- stalled network connections, or attacks.
-
- We don't need to reimplement full tcp windows, with sequence numbers,
- the ability to drop cells when we're full etc, because the tcp streams
- already guarantee in-order delivery of each cell. Rather than trying
- to build some sort of tcp-on-tcp scheme, we implement this minimal data
- congestion control; so far it's enough.
-
- Router twins. In many cases when we ask for a router with a given
- address and port, we really mean a router who knows a given key. Router
- twins are two or more routers that share the same private key. We thus
- give routers extra flexibility in choosing the next hop in the circuit: if
- some of the twins are down or slow, it can choose the more available ones.
-
- Currently the code tries for the primary router first, and if it's down,
- chooses the first available twin.