Crate tor_ptmgr

source ·
Expand description

§tor-ptmgr

Manage a set of anti-censorship pluggable transports.

§Overview

This crate is part of Arti, a project to implement Tor in Rust.

In Tor, a “transport” is a mechanism used to avoid censorship by disguising the Tor protocol as some other kind of traffic.

A “pluggable transport” is one that is not implemented by default as part of the Tor protocol, but which can instead be added later on by the packager or the user. Pluggable transports are typically provided as external binaries that implement a SOCKS proxy, along with certain other configuration protocols.

This crate provides a means to manage a set of configured pluggable transports

§Limitations

TODO: Currently, the APIs for this crate make it quite tor-specific. Notably, it can only return Channels! It would be good instead to adapt it so that it was more generally useful by other projects that want to use pluggable transports in rust. For now, I have put the Tor-channel-specific stuff behind a tor-channel-factory feature, but there are no APIs for using PTs without that feature currently. That should change. (See issue arti#666)

TODO: The first version of this crate will probably only conform to the original Tor pluggable transport protocol, and not to more recent variants as documented at pluggabletransports.info

§Feature flags

§Additive features

  • tor-channel-factory: Build with support for a ChannelFactory implementation that allows this crate’s use with Tor. (Currently, this is the only way to use the crate; see “Limitations” section above.)

  • full – Build with all the features above.

§Experimental and unstable features

Note that the APIs enabled by these features are NOT covered by semantic versioning guarantees: we might break them or remove them between patch versions.

  • experimental-api – build with experimental, unstable API support.

  • experimental – Build with all experimental features above, along with all experimental features from other arti crates.

License: MIT OR Apache-2.0

Modules§

  • config
    Configuration logic for tor-ptmgr.
  • err
    Errors to do with pluggable transports.
  • ipc
    Launching pluggable transport binaries and communicating with them.

Structs§

  • PtMgr
    A pluggable transport manager knows how to make different kinds of connections to the Tor network, for censorship avoidance.