On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:15 AM, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) lists@infosecurity.ch wrote:

Hi all,

in a network where the Directory Authority hard-coded in Tor code are filtered a Tor client cannot bootstrap.

But as far as i understood there are (hundreds?) of Tor DA Mirror.

If so, packaging the Tor clients periodically, bundling the latest consensus with the software, would provide higher chance for a client to bootstrap, finding an unfiltered Tor DA Mirror.

Yup. (In our design documents and specifications, they're called "directory caches.")

Please see proposal 146 for an initial design here back from 2008, and the discussions on #572 for a list of obstacles we ran into the last time we tried to implement it. Still seems worth doing to me, but there are some remaining issues to solve there. Designs welcome. Code also welcome.

yrs,