[Haskell-cafe] Tor project

[Adam Wick]

Hi -

Yes, we (Galois) are. The end goal is to have a Tor implementation running on a HaLVM. Right now the project is internal, but the plan is to push a basic relay node implementation out to our GitHub site sometime in the next few weeks.

As for TLS, it is possible that timing attacks based on a functional language implementation could be more likely than those for a traditional C implementation. On the other hand, functional language implementations protect you from a wide variety of attacks that occur in C implementations. I don’t believe the balance has been studied, but it’d be interesting.

I do know the OCaml/Mirage folks have been having good luck with their TLS implementation. I believe they’ve at least started doing some red team analysis of it, as well, with good results. See their various blog posts, starting with http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-ocaml-tls. I’m not sure if Vincent’s library has been subject to similar evaluation, and I know the partial library in our Tor implementation has not been.


- Adam


Quoth:
> I’ll make a question out of it:
> 
> Is anyone working on a Haskell project compatible with Tor? Library, Server, Browser, etc.
> Is anyone interested in such a project?
> Would the Haskell Runtime and TLS modules have any time dependent behavior that would make encryption harder/easier to break than C implementations? Basically, is the TLS attach surface smaller or larger than openssl and is there any data to support claims of such?