Hi,
I am Nikhil. R, a student from India. You can know more about me
from here[1] and here[2]. I have been running a Tor relay for
sometime and now I am interested in contributing to the Tor
Project. Specifically, I would like to work on IP Hijacking
detection for Tor relays. I understand this does not involve
directly with the Tor core hence I think this project is ideal in
getting my feet wet with the Tor Community and get me started for
further contributions to the Tor Project.
BGP hijacking is difficult without inside help from ISP's(I think
?) but state run adversaries don't necessarily have this problem.
This has a great risk of exposing all Tor clients or even mess
around with the name resolution in exit relays. I have also read
about incidents where an attacker using BGP hijacking, hijacked a
portion of a Bitcoin mining pool traffic to pay himself instead of
the people contributing the processing power. I feel BGP has major
security implications in this aspect and a monitoring service is
necessary. There are many monitoring services and we can possibly
leverage one of them for the routing data.
The main motive of the service would be to find anomalies/
malicious changes in the routing information compared to previous
snapshots of the same. How do we actually do this comparison ? Any
pointers for that ? The project also mentions that the service
should be Tor-aware. What exactly does this mean ? Does it mean
that, it should monitor all tor relays ip addresses ? It would be
wonderful if you could elaborate on the project in a little more
detail.
I am a beginner in this area and please excuse me if any of the
above questions are too stupid.
Regards,
Nikhil. R
[1]:
https://in.linkedin.com/in/rnikhil275
[2]
https://rnikhil275.github.io