Tor, a privacy network protocol used for anonymity services, has been under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for months, and Wasabi Wallet has devised a solution for its users, according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine.
Tor is used in the infrastructure of several Bitcoin projects to provide anonymity to their clients. As a result, because the ongoing attack has made leveraging the platform difficult, many of these projects, including Wasabi, have struggled to reliably deliver their products.
Wasabi had previously connected to Tor’s backend onion server. Wasabi, on the other hand, is now using exit nodes, which direct traffic to the coinjoin coordinator’s cleannet domain.
As a result, all traffic is still anonymized, protecting the IP addresses of service users. Testing of this new process revealed increased coinjoin round reliability and frequency while also preventing inputs from being blocked by the coordinator, which occurs when signatures for inputs fail.
“Tor is a critical project for privacy on bitcoin and the internet that millions of people rely on every day,” said Max Hillebrand, Wasabi Contributor and CEO of zkSNACKs.
However, this solution does not address the issue of Tor being under attack; rather, it provides a necessary short-term workaround. As a result, Wasabi is raising funds to support the Tor network.
“Wasabi Wallet is grateful that such a tool exists and will do everything in our power to support Tor by promoting it and assisting with its fundraising,” Hillebrand said.
“Because Tor reliability has a direct impact on Wasabi Wallet users’ user experience, we are very concerned about this issue.”
It also included a “privacy progress meter,” which enables customers to see the level of privacy reached by their conjoin by measuring several metrics that are available in the desktop program. This feature was a welcome addition to the platform.
