network-health

network-health@lists.torproject.org

January 2021

1 participants
2 discussions

New attack on the dir auths (Jan 27)
by Roger Dingledine 27 Jan '21

27 Jan '21

Hi folks, This afternoon a new traffic overload appeared, and this one looks definitely intentional. Somebody is trying to harm the Tor network. Maybe they're doing it to impact v3 onion services (because of the other bug, which is fixed but not everybody has the update) or maybe they're just trying to be jerks. We've missed several consensuses recently, and we should expect to miss more. I'm running a branch on moria1 that I think will work as a stopgap, but a majority of the dir auth operators are happily asleep right now, so on the theory that things won't burn down in the next hours, I'm going to let them finish sleeping and they can apply the patch on their Thursday. So expect things to remain uncomfortable for some hours yet. The fix as we currently imagine it will involve exit relays applying a patch too -- or if they can't patch easily, upgrading to a new upcoming version of Tor that has a fix in it. --Roger

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v3 onion services unusable for a few hours today
by Roger Dingledine 27 Jan '21

27 Jan '21

Hi folks, The overload bugs on the directory authorities are continuing, but they also continue to be mostly manageable. But today, we spent several consensus intervals in a row without making a consensus -- which is supposed to be fine because Tor clients can do fine so long as they have a consensus from within the last 24 hours, but it exposed a bug in the v3 onion service implementation, where v3 onion clients and v3 onion services choose not to even attempt to fetch or publish v3 onion descriptors: Jan 10 11:32:24.364 [warn] No live consensus so we can't get the responsible hidden service directories. The fix imo is that we need to make v3 onion services work under the same time assumptions as the other parts of Tor -- if you have a usable consensus, then use it. I've opened this ticket for the network team: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40237 --Roger

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