[Tor-BSD] tor Ports 9050 and 9150

Michael McConville mmcconville at mykolab.com
Sat Aug 1 01:15:37 EDT 2015


teor wrote:
> I wanted to explain why Tor Browser uses tor SOCKS port 9150, but the
> default system tor port is 9050.
> 
> Tor Browser is designed to run its own instance of tor on 9150, and to
> not conflict with any existing system tor install on 9050. (This, of
> course, causes some confusion, and some tor clients look on 9050, and
> others on 9150.)
> 
> If you want to use the system tor for both Tor Browser and other apps,
> why not just have it listen on both 9050 and 9150?
> 
> There are security implications of using the same tor instance for
> multiple apps (mainly cache sharing, denial of service, and
> single-point-of-hack/failure). However, there are also advantages in
> combining all your tor traffic together, as it's (slightly) harder to
> analyse that way.

I think we should stick to the project's defaults unless we have a very
good reason not to. I feel like there's headache and subtle breakage to
be had here.



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