Zcash on Tor : A Community Funded Proposal

Community Collaborations
20

@installer_of_zcash Thanks for your above post. Herewith, linked ‘official’ sources for the mentioned repos;

For ‘monitoring’ your running Tor instance on a debian / ubuntu server, Arm (CLI) is probably best.

With Arm running you are able to see the number of incoming hidden_service requests (anonymously of course, without affecting users anonymity etc.,) and your own outgoing SOCKS connectivity to Zcash configured .onion addresses.

Ordinarily installed as follows, although the packages can be pulled ‘anonymously’ of course;

sudo apt-get install tor-arm

It is a very good idea to ensure that you have tor-geoipdb , apparmor-utils and screen installed. Again, ordinarily I would do;

sudo apt-get install tor-geoipdb tor-arm apparmor-utils screen

For the Arm controller to function properly you must ensure that the following is present in your torrc;

DisableDebuggerAttachment 0

Now you can start a new screen session for Arm;

screen -S arm

sudo -u debian-tor arm

Arm should connect to Tor as a controller automatically. You can then navigate Arm with the arrow keys etc., Crtl + A + D to exit the screen session.

screen -r arm

to return to view arm.

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1 . We do require an ‘official’ / permanent solution to call zcash-fetch-params ‘anonymously’. There are a few ways to do this already, however a definitive method should really be provided by ZECC. I would willing host a (temporary?) .onion repo. though.

For a desktop set-up I’d currently advise running Whonix-Qubes: Qubes-Whonix ™ Overview - which will pull everything ‘anonymously’ via Tor.

2 . Arm Tor controller will help you ensure that everything is working properly with your set-up.

If you then do;

cd zcash

./src/zcash-cli getpeerinfo

and if you see outgoing IP addresses that are not .onion addresses (when this is the desired functionality of your set-up i.e. onlynet=onion or onion=127.0.0.1:9050 etc.,) then something is clearly a miss.

If you are referring to potential DNS leaks with Tor, then using Wireshark (cli) would be a good starting point.

…

I would be delighted to have others collaborate on documentation and to help promote the project in due course. Again, the more folks that can run Zcash on Tor the better, especially as ‘Dual Stack’! If anyone has a zcash addnode=.onion address running on a stable server then I’m always willing to add it to the core project list.