This is an update of the initial blog post on running rust-libp2p traffic over the Tor network. In that post we used the torut library to configure the tor onion service in code. Turns out, for some use cases, there is a more simple method. This post runs through that method.

I have created and hosted on crates.io a crate that implements a libp2p transport, for this post I’ll be referencing code in the repository backing that crate and also the examples directory of that repository.

Basic networked application in Rust using libp2p

The examples directory contains a module called ping that implements the ping server as we did in the first blog post, copying code from the rust-libp2p ping example.

Configuring Tor via the runcom file

What I would like to discuss is how we configure the onion service (formally hidden service). In v1 of this post we used torut to do so. I have since discovered that by simple adding a few lines to the tor runcom file (e.g. /etc/tor/torcr) we can configure the onion service and simplify considerably the usage of our tor transport. To the config file we can un-comment/add the following lines:

    HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
    HiddenServicePort 7 127.0.0.1:7777

Once tor runs it will store the onion address for the service we just configured in the hidden service directory given i.e.,

cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname
7gr3dngwhk74thi4vv6bm3v3bicaxe4apvcemoxo3hadpvsyfifjqnid.onion

We pass this address to the swarm’s dial method as one would expect to with any other multi address.

The final piece of magic that we need to provide is a mapping of onion addresses to local port numbers. This allows the listen side of the transport to create a TCP socket and bind it to the port that Tor is expecting. In the above example the local process listens on port 7777 so when we call listen_on with the onion address above this onion address is mapped to port 7777.

BOOM! That’s it, the Socks5TokioTcpConfig type takes care of everything else for us and we are away - anonymous peer to peer applications in Rust using rust-libp2p over Tor!

Thanks for reading,
Tobin Harding.