This is directed to anyone having knowledge about the inner workings of
openvpn software: how difficult would it be to add an integer parameter
to the invocation of openvpn which would instruct the network of the
number of times to bounce packets around the network before going out
to the world?
This would allow any vpn server to act as tor.
I fear that this question comes from a confusion about how the term "VPN"
is used and misused.
VPN stands for "Virtual Private Network", it sets up an encrypted
connection between two points and somehow emulates some kind of network
device at each end. This allows you to route network traffic between the
two points and even though the original connection between the two points
are considered unsafe as others might use tools like tcpdump or wireshark
to listen on the network traffic the VPN software will encrypt the
traffic on a more or less public network to give you a "Virtual Private
Network".
A proxy server is a completely different thing. A proxy server allows you
to connect to it, telling it which server you really wanted to connect
to. The proxy server will then connect to the server you asked for and
there might be differetn reasons for using different kinds of proxy
servers.
One reason to use a proxy server might be that it somehow "cleans" the
network traffic. The proxy server might block ads or stop you from
accessing known "bad" sites. Another reason to use a proxy server might
be anonymity, the server that you connect to will not see your IP address
but instead some IP address that belongs to your proxy server.
The confusion between these two different things come from the fact that
many more or less commercial services providing proxy servers provide a
VPN to connect to their proxy server. For some odd reason these service
providers often call their service a "VPN" even though the primary use
for their service is a proxy server.
Tor is a proxy service in multiple steps, this is so the end point don't
know where the traffic came from and the middle points don't know if
previous point was the traffic origin. There are tragic examples of
people who have mistaken tor for a way to encrypt the traffic to the
server that they wanted to connect to but the hard way found out that
traffic between tor the end point and server was unencrypted. Here is an
old article about that subject:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150705184539/https:/chloe.re/2015/06/20/a-
month-with-badonions/
OpenVPN is not intended to be something like tor, it is simply VPN
software in the true meaning of VPN, to encrypt network traffic between a
VPN server and one or more VPN clients.
Would it be possible to make OpenVPN behave like tor? Yes, with
opensource software like OpenVPN anything is possible, but you would be
required to make major modifications of those "configuration" files named
*.c .
regards Henrik