- tor-relays-universities - lists.torproject.org

Tor on Campus
by April Glaser 15 Nov '14

15 Nov '14

Hello all, I'm April, an activist at EFF. I'm trying to reactivate this list a bit and see who on here is still in a university and is currently running a relay or an exit. Not only am I interested in writing about it for EFF, but I know some new folks have joined that are struggling to try and start one on their campus. I'd also like to start pointing interested students to this list who want to try. The Tor Challenge, which ended last week, had a special section for Tor on Campus: https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/tor-on-campus.html It'd be great if any folks could chime in and let me know about relays or exits on campus. Also let us know if you're currently in process and facing road blocks. We helped one group of students in Iowa last year get past some troubling free speech hurdles last year. The student group was banned from forming and from even having a discussion about Tor. Now they are in conversations with campus IT about setting up a relay. It's awesome. Here's the story: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/10/digital-freedom-groups-road-… That's all for now! Thanks much, April -- April Glaser Electronic Frontier Foundation 415-436-9333 x154 support our work: https://eff.org/join

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Re: [tor-relays-universities] [tor-talk] I can't use tor in state university's campus network...
by grarpamp 21 Jul '14

21 Jul '14

>> On 07/21/2014 10:40 AM, ttzeqq wrote: >> > I am in US.What can I do? On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Patrick <apexcp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Do a lot of universities block Tor? If this is a student running the client on personally owned equipment merely to surf the web, a US university would be on shaky legal ground to block such use. They may try to say 'proxies / hiding IP' banned but are inviting a big privacy rights / FERPA / freespeech fight. If used to publish a hidden service, some places do ban running 'services', presumably for 'security' or bandwidth reasons, but they've no proof, just speculation on encrypted traffic. If this is a staff member or on university owned equipment, the university pretty much owns that space as usual.

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Fwd: [tor-relays] Running relays at consortia networks [was: JANET/edu]
by grarpamp 10 Jun '14

10 Jun '14

C, there is also a tor-relays-universities list. Forwarding there to keep the initial chat primed. Once you have buy in from legal, chairs, security, upstream, etc this can be a very strong position, often better than pay 'contract' of random ISP host. I have seen such 'outside' nets used for these not strictly mission things, such I suggest it in this thread. Different approach depends on if you can find and house a legitimate paper producing research purpose, or if you simply will run it for supporting freedom point of view. Worth mention is that both internet2 and nanog have mailing lists where queries and propositions could be sent. Cold contacts at regionals are not hard to find. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Cristóbal Palmer <cmpalmer(a)ibiblio.org> Date: Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 5:56 PM Subject: Re: [tor-relays] Running relays at consortia networks [was: JANET/edu] To: tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org On Jun 7, 2014 3:27 PM, "grarpamp" <grarpamp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Has anyone tried approaching these networks themselves > to see about running relays there? Their bandwidth for sponsored > things is often free. In the US you might try internet2.edu and all > its various connecting regional networks. I'm at a member institution for Internet2, and the buy-in process put us in a research VLAN "outside" the university network. I'd be very interested in hearing from people at other member institutions about coordinating management of risk such that our service is more supportable and robust.

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Running relays at consortia networks [was: JANET/edu]
by grarpamp 07 Jun '14

07 Jun '14

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Iain R. Learmonth <irl(a)fsfe.org> wrote: > I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about JANET's (the UK academic ISP) > views on running a Tor relay? > > It's probably not worth putting together a proposal for running one in a UK > University if the ISP is going to have problems with it. Has anyone tried approaching these networks themselves to see about running relays there? Their bandwidth for sponsored things is often free. In the US you might try internet2.edu and all its various connecting regional networks. On a second further approach, once all the risks and pro-reasons have been discussed and accepted, the consortia backing of many Uni's within would be bulletproof.

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Tor relay on JANET
by Iain R. Learmonth 05 Jun '14

05 Jun '14

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about JANET's (the UK academic ISP) views on running a Tor relay? It's probably not worth putting together a proposal for running one in a UK University if the ISP is going to have problems with it. Thanks, Iain. -- urn:x-human:Iain R. Learmonth http://iain.learmonth.me/ mailto:irl@fsfe.org xmpp:irl@jabber.fsfe.org tel:+447875886930 GPG Fingerprint: 1F72 607C 5FF2 CCD5 3F01 600D 56FF 9EA4 E984 6C49 Please verify out-of-band before trusting with sensitive information. This email was composed Thu 5 Jun 20:48:25 BST 2014.

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Re: [tor-relays-universities] Preventing access to scientific databases
by Jesse Victors 19 Mar '14

19 Mar '14

For my exit at USU, I've had great success with blocking access to journals and publications by configuring the machine's firewall and Tor's exit policy to reject outbound to the university's IP block, except for our DNS servers. I pulled up a journal in my laptop using Chrome and got access, but when I used Tor (with torrc configured to use my exit) the same page timed out because the machine couldn't contact the library's resources. I don't know if there's a session key, Kerberos, or some kind of other access-granting mechanism that the library's site uses to grant journal access to machines on USU, but when I block outbound it doesn't go through, whatever it is. Your mileage may vary depending on how your network is configured. For me, experimentation worked just fine, and I would recommend blocking campus machines anyway. If it doesn't work, try something different, or talk to your sysadmins and get advice. Jesse V.

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Fwd: Partnership between Wikimedia community and Tor community...
by Lane Rasberry 10 Feb '14

10 Feb '14

Hello, My name is Lane and I contribute to Wikipedia. I am writing to invite members of the Tor community to give comment on a proposal to establish some kind of partnership between the Tor community and the Wikimedia community. I myself am not a Tor user, so I do not have a good understanding of what the Tor community might desire from our side and would appreciate feedback on the extent to which this seems worthwhile. One proposal is to create infrastructure which would allow Tor users to write and contribute to Wikipedia articles and other Wikimedia projects. This would probably include the Wikimedia Foundation having a Tor exit node. I am proposing this as part "The Day We Fight Back". <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_We_Fight_Back> A draft of the proposal is here < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Partnership_between_Wikimedi… > and the discussion page is at < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/Partnership_between_Wik… > Anyone who is not using Tor can edit either of those pages. If Tor users wish to share thoughts there, then I can offer to post anything there on behalf of anyone who mails me their comments. Thanks to everyone who can share any ideas. yours, -- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane(a)bluerasberry.com

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Preventing access to scientific databases
by Philipp Winter 06 Feb '14

06 Feb '14

At Karlstad University, we recently got permission to operate an exit relay. One item on our "to do" list is how we should handle databases such as IEEE Xplore. Our university has several subscriptions meaning that our net block is whitelisted to have access to the databases of different publishers. Unfortunately, we cannot allow users of our exit node to access these databases as we would risk violating copyright. Possible solutions are: - Blacklist the publisher's net blocks in our relay's exit policy. - Put our relay's IP address in a non-whitelisted net block. - Do nothing and risk getting sued? How is this handled elsewhere? Cheers, Philipp

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Re: [tor-relays-universities] Preventing access to scientific databases
by Timothy Hayes 05 Feb '14

05 Feb '14

Rutgers has dozens of sections of our network which support people that are not faulty, staff, or students. The libraries were very unhappy to learn about this a few years ago. I honestly don't know their solution, but tor is only one of many such things they have to deal with (which include such things as random proxies run by foreign grad students, planetlab, k12 schools, outreach programs, and soon open wifi for unauthenticated guests.) I think for the most part they ignore the problem until they get a complaint. -- Timothy Hayes Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Office of Information Technology, Information Protection & Security Voice: 848-445-7515 Fax: 732-445-8023 Email: thayes(a)rutgers.edu

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Traceroute from Tor relays
by Anupam Das 02 Nov '13

02 Nov '13

*** START EMAIL *** Hello university Tor relay operators, We could use your help in a pilot project to improve Tor security. As you may be aware, the anonymity of a connection over Tor is vulnerable to an adversary who can observe it in enough places along its route. For example, traffic that crosses the same country as it enters and leaves the Tor network can potentially be deanonymized by an authority in that country who can monitor all network communication. Researchers have been working to figure out how Tor traffic gets routed over the Internet [0-3], but determining routes with high confidence has been difficult. That's where you come in. To figure out where traffic travels from your relay, we'd like you to run a bunch of "traceroutes" - network measurements that show the paths traffic takes. This is a one-time experiment for now, but, depending on what we find out, regularly making such measurements may become a part of Tor itself. We have already gotten some results thanks to Linus Nordberg of DFRI and Moritz Bartl of torservers.net, and now we need help from the broader Tor community. We would like to start this right away. We have written some shell scripts to automate most of the process. The easiest way for you to get them is with git, using the following commands: git clone https://bitbucket.org/anupam_das/traceroute-from-tor-relays git checkout bdc09b31a590968793b86f62034b0b4035bb7d77 You can also just download the files directly by visiting [4]. Detailed instructions for setting up and running the experiment are in the README. A description of the project and a FAQ is online [5], but basically the experiment does traceroutes to three groups: all "routable IP prefixes", all Tor relays, and then all /24 subnets. These kinds of measurements are not uncommon. By default the scripts will periodically move the results to our server [6] via SSH, although you can keep the results around and/or not send them automatically if you wish (see the README). The traceroute data recorded is not sensitive or private at all. We plan to make the code and data public, following Tor's practice of open cooperation with the research community [7]. The measurements will work best if you have the "scamper" tool from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) installed (see the README for installation instructions). This is a standard and open-source tool that handles the many modern complexities of Internet routing measurement. If you are not able to run scamper, the script will also work with the more-common but less-accurate and slower "traceroute" utility. We do not currently have support for Windows relays. The output will take up around 1MB disk space if you use scamper; on the other hand if you use "traceroute" utility each output will be around 4MB. The measurements will use 58.6KiBps in each direction with scamper and 45KiBps with traceroute, although you can adjust these rates via parameter settings (again, see the README). Depending on whether you run scamper or traceroute the total time required varies, but results for traceroutes to "routable IP prefixes" and all Tor relays should finish within one week (possibly earlier). We would like to request relay operators to upload those results once finished. This experiment is in collaboration with several researchers, but the leads are Anupam Das, a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his advisor Nikita Borisov. Based on a review of the scripts of commit bdc09b31a590968793b86f62034b0b4035bb7d77, we believe that they operate as described above. Please do read through them yourself, and let us know if you have any questions or concerns. And also feel free to contact us at tor-traceroutes(a)illinois.edu for help or with suggestions. Because of you, Tor is the "king" of anonymous communication. With your help, we will keep improving to face the new challenges to privacy and freedom online. Thank you, Karsten Loesing <karsten(a)torproject.org> Anupam Das <das17(a)illinois.edu> Nikita Borisov <nikita(a)illinois.edu> Reach us all at <tor-traceroutes(a)illinois.edu> [0] "Protecting anonymity in the presence of autonomous system and internet exchange level adversaries" by Joshua Juen. Master's Thesis, UIUC. 2012. <https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/34363> [1] "Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries" by Aaron Johnson, Chris Wacek, Rob Jansen, Micah Sherr, and Paul Syverson. ACM CCS 2013. <http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/ccs2013-usersrouted.pdf> [2] "AS-awareness in Tor path selection" by Matthew Edman and Paul F. Syverson. ACM CCS 2009. <http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/DBLP:conf/ccs/EdmanS09.pdf> [3] "Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries" by Steven J. Murdoch and Piotr Zieliński. PETS 2007. <http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/murdoch-pet2007.pdf> [4] https://bitbucket.org/anupam_das/traceroute-from-tor-relays/downloads [5] http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~das17/tor-traceroute_v1.html [6] ttat-control.iti.illinois.edu [7] https://metrics.torproject.org/ *** END EMAIL ***

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