Arti-rest

If you ever wanted to use tor in a mobile app, up to now you always had to install a tor-proxy alongside your mobile app. Then you could use this tor-proxy to pass all your requests through. Arti-rest is a library that can be directly integrated into an Android or iOS app if all you want to do is a simple REST request over the Tor network.

Arti-wrapper to use REST over Tor:

arti-ios   arti-android
      I     I
     arti-rest
         I
       arti

Arti-rest provides a synchronous interface to send REST requests over tor, and to receive the answers. It also does the TLS handling of the connection. The asynchronous part needs to be done by the Android and iOS library.

Reliability

Even though we tried our best to produce good code, this should not be used in a mission critical piece of software without proper consideration of the following:

• arti itself mentions it's not ready for prime-time. In their README, they write you should probably not use Arti in production
• the current code implements caching of the tor-directory listing to avoid having to download some megabytes of node descriptors every so often. Again, given the right circumstances, this can be effective and secure enough. Under other circumstances this is something you don't want to do.

Mobile Libraries

Because iOS XCFrameworks and libraries need to reside in a separate github repository, we decided to have both Android and iOS in a separate repository:

• Android
• iOS

You can have a look at these repositories for further instructions how to use the library.

Test apps

The Android test app is in the arti-android repository. For the iOS test app, see here: arti-ios-test

Roadmap:

• v0.1 - Simple GET request and reply using TLS - done
• v0.2 - Optimized setting up of the Tor circuit - first version done
• v0.3 - Add certificate configurations to the tor-cache directory
• v0.4 - Configure arti-rest to either use standard tor, or a pre-configured circuit
• v1.0 - Once arti is deemed stable enough, and other people have looked and used this code

Directories

• ./ is the rust library for the wrapper with arti
• ./ios holds scripts to create the XCFramework used in the arti-ios
• ./tools holds scripts to generate the files for the offline setup of the tor circuits

Pre-caching of tor circuits

This library has a modified directory manager of arti that allows to use pre-downloaded circuits. The idea is to download these circuits once per week, or once per month, and then being able to setup new circuits with these pre-downloaded circuits. Of course this requires trusting the server who provide the circuits.

For more information, see Directory Cache Setup

License

This is licensed under MPL 2.0