js-tor-dht-poc

JS + Tor + DHT Proof of Concept

This is a proof of concept showing how to have JS connect and find providers from a DHT built in Go. This is accomplished creating an onion service via bine and have the JS use websockets via js-libp2p to communicate with the go-tor-dht-poc impl.

Running the Service

This assumes the latest nodejs/npm, Go, and Tor are on the PATH. First, the website's index.js needs to be built from the dev version. In this directory, after running npm install, run npm run browserify. This will create a file at public/index.js. It is quite large for this dev version (3.2MB on last check). Rerun this command again if anything in index.js is changed.

Now that the JS file is there, build and run the onion service website hoster via go build && js-tor-dht-poc. This will output the address of an onion service to open in the Tor browser and will remain open until enter is pressed.

Using the Service

Open the Tor browser and navigate to the given URL. Note, this can take a while because the JS is so large. Assuming that the go-tor-dht-poc provide command is running, grab any of the peer strings and enter it into the text box on the webpage. Then click Find Providers. It can take a little bit, but if there are no errors, the first and last peers from the provide command (the ones providing the value we're testing) will be listed on the webpage.

How it Works

First, the Go code just creates a simple file-system web server that serves the public/ directory. This web server is hosted over an onion service and the address is given.

As for the webpage, it is a very simple HTML file that references a JS file. The JS file uses js-libp2p and when find provider is clicked, it creates a libp2p node and bootstraps it with that one address. Then, once it has confirmed it has connected and it has been added to the peer list, it issues a find provider which grabs other peers as necessary and eventually the answer.

Notes

• The browserified JS is huge at 3.2MB. This is not really acceptable, and it shrunk by over half with Uglify but there were other problems with Uglify. I need to try Webpack. But even > 1MB is too big. More investigation needed here.
• I changed the Go side's libp2p onion address format /onion/<onion-id>:<port> to /dns4/<onion-id>/tcp/<port> since that is more easily recognized in libp2p as a normal web address in the Tor browser. Also, the JS side of multiaddr doesn't support custom protocols very well as of this writing.
• It takes a little bit for first bootstrapping the DHT, but it's not that bad. I wonder if I remove the secio stuff if the time would improve a lot.
• We don't reuse the node on the DHT, we recreate it every time, but ideally you would connect once at the beginning and reuse it.
• It is a bit convoluted to get the DHT ready, see this issue where I explain some of the things I had to do.
• Web sockets in the Tor browser work well.