February 3, 2026
Move fast, break anonymity
Reimplementing Tor from Scratch for a Single-Hop Proxy
Broke student swaps privacy for speed, rebuilds Tor while comments scream “just use a VPN”
TLDR: A student built a one-hop Tor-like tool to get faster school internet and posted the code. Comments clap the effort but mostly say to use a simple VPN instead, warning this undermines Tor’s privacy goals and sparks a speed-versus-safety showdown.
A student, chasing faster school internet, open‑sourced a DIY project to re‑create Tor with a single hop for speed, not secrecy. Tor normally bounces your traffic through multiple stops to hide you; single‑hop is faster but less private, and Tor intentionally blocks it. So the student says: fine, I’ll roll my own and run a relay, code and all at github.com/FoxMoss/kurrat/. The comments immediately lit up. The strongest opinion: “Dude, just use WireGuard,” a popular do‑it‑yourself VPN, instead of reinventing a privacy system to go fast. Security folks thundered that this trend undercuts Tor’s mission, comparing it to "move fast and break anonymity." Others clapped for the hustle—“learning by building” is the vibe—while still calling it overkill for a school network. The drama centers on speed vs. safety: is it genius frugality or reckless tinkering? Hot takes accused the author of crafting a “Not‑Tor” that might attract the exact nasties Tor tries to deter. Meanwhile, jokesters rolled out memes like YOLOsec and "budget privacy: speed edition," with one commenter imagining a future where the student’s exit node gets spammed and the campus IT goes nuclear. It’s a real‑world lesson: privacy tools aren’t just for speed, and the crowd will absolutely tell you so.
Key Points
- •Tor is intentionally designed to prevent single-hop proxy use, specifically blocking direct connections to exit nodes.
- •Tor’s code (connection_exit_begin_conn) refuses clients unless the connection’s identity digest is known as a relay and policy allows it.
- •Known relay checks rely on consensus data and relay descriptors (connection_or_digest_is_known_relay).
- •The author proposes running a relay and backing up identity keys to maintain relay reputation despite ramp-up time.
- •A hand-rolled C++ reimplementation was started, with open-source code available at github.com/FoxMoss/kurrat/, instead of using C Tor or Arti.