June 2014 - tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Operating system diversity?
by Jonathan D. Proulx 17 Jun '14

17 Jun '14

Hi All, In the recent thread relating to Debian relay Puppet modules it was suggested that a greater diversity of operating systems in tor nodes wooudl be preferable. I'm not sure if this was meant as a technical or aesthetic preference, but I am curious. Is there any technical benefit to rounning a more diverse set of opensource oprating systems for tor nodes? I discount closed source as we don't know what's going on in there. Would that present significantly different attack surfaces? I can imagine a vulnerability in the TCP stack or other kernel functionality in Linux would not be the saem in FreeBSD or vice versa... My nodes are currently Ubuntu but if there's a reason to do so I coould possibly switch OS to FreeBSD (or hurd does tor run on hurd :)) -Jon

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Advertised Bandwidth increasing
by kingqueen 17 Jun '14

17 Jun '14

Hi I'm running the new, imaginatively-nicknamed kingqueenbtnftw relay. I have read around a lot but something I don't get. I thought advertised bandwidth was what I'd put in torrc whereas consensus weight was what some uber-machines tested my relay at, with the idea that this can foil disruption attacks by false relays pretending to give high bandwidth. SO I expected consensus weight to gradually increase. What I didn't expect was for the advertised bandwidth to increase by step changes (as shown on atlas and globe). Evidently I've got something wrong. Could somebody please enlighten this poor nub? By the way, I appreciate that consensus weight is a dimensions number but I understand that it originated as being based on kibibytes per second? If this is still the case, it's currently significantly more than my advertised bandwidth (which is less than that set in TORRC) but appears below it in the graphs? Thanks to anyone who educates me. I have full intent on both the T-shirts on offer - the standard Tor one for uptime and bandwidth, and the EFF one for still being online in a year with over 1MBps transfer :-) Hi to all who know me Kingqueen -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

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Ops request: Deploy OpenVPN terminators
by grarpamp 16 Jun '14

16 Jun '14

Ops request: Deploy OpenVPN terminators We are ops because we want to allow people to avoid censorship and speak freely. But are we doing all we can? It is well known that all relays, exit or non-exit are added to a variety of blocklists. Primarily through scraping the consensus. And those blocklists are then used to indiscriminately deny legitimate users/people access to sites, regardless of their 'behaviour', which more often than not has simply not been determined yet. So we need to augment what we're doing in order to be effective in our mission. Here's how... We already run Tor on an IP, that IP is blackballed as noted above, so using another port on it as a vpn terminator is pointless. Yet our hosting packages often offer other IP's in the same range, or we already have them to use as part of the deal (or, failing that, we can forward the openvpn TCP port on our bad relay IP to another clean non-bulk-blocked IP we control). We obviously cannot publish this new openvpn 'exit/termination' IP anywhere, such as in the comment field of the consensus as it will be banned. *But we can bind to it and let users find it with their own openvpn scans close to (one up or down from) our OR IP.* Just use the standard openvpn TCP port on it. There is no bandwidth cost to us to do this because all the traffic is moved between the exit IP and the openvpn termination IP over localhost. (Well, unless you are forwarding openvpn port on OR IP to another termination real IP off your box.) At minimum we should allow TCP transport out from the vpn to the world, aka the usual nat, so as to make websurfing work for our users. Bonus for allowing nattable outbound UDP, ICMP, etc. Further bonus for allowing inbound binds on whatever port on the IP that is available to be bound to. Obviously sine the IP is scarce to us, we can't allow full unnatted use of the IP. The point is, we already own these extra IP's, and legitimate people are being blocked from services for no reason other than kneejerk or blind reactions to Tor via blocking services. Ahem, cloudflare, et al and other blocking 'services' well known to us. So to the extent we have other IP's available to us, we should set them up to be unpublished openvpn nodes and let users find us by trying to terminate their vpn connections on us at that IP and openvpn port. Yes, blocklists could try the 'one IP up/down' scan method and list this project of ours too, but it's more work for them and they're unlikely to do it in any sort of global fashion. Especially since they can't prove it's part of Tor (because we don't publish the IP's as such). If we wish to make an announcement that we are running such terminators, obviously it should not be made from addresses related to our OR IP's. [FWIW, there is another openvpn terminator project out there. Unlike ours would be, its nodes are public, and even with that detriment (though possibly only because it is lesser known) it obtains more freedom from blocklisting than Tor. However its termination points perform poorly/unreliably whereas ours would be both nonpublished and better managed.]

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New SSL keys for new OpenSSL version?
by no.thing_to-hide＠cryptopathie.eu 16 Jun '14

16 Jun '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello Tor! I run an internal Tor relay on Debian Wheezy. Today the OpenSSL version was updated to 1.0.1e-2+deb7u11 . Do I need to delete the old SSL keys like after the Heartbleed bug? Thanks and best regards Anton - -- no.thing_to-hide at cryptopathie dot eu 0x30C3CDF0, RSA 2048, 24 Mar 2014 0FF8 A811 8857 1B7E 195B 649E CC26 E1A5 30C3 CDF0 Bitmessage (no metadata): BM-2cXixKZaqzJmTfz6ojiyLzmKg2JbzDnApC -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJTn1hxAAoJEMwm4aUww83weJAH/jYHtjrhrFrGnVdjrKPlN/TR w9NZcvRd0GrNDbZGGwemVam+OmFdHTDEeWZ73fgb/DvrGT8Iej8hD09/vD37xn9p GYhLabsKW06j8oRz7fiVDlWVOWND8QHW+UImnwKcIlvgp9a2EaSyBGVshIGppqMW wGgc8ZhoXvo5fAe/M630PHi6e/oGDJZIilSTIDmttV8M9cTEmsxah64oHZiJqVqc ierCAlAlsbkYH7fs7/QgJw0QolnhtcIZ5ALgijT+Z4EGH5oJBFnA20lvni1qLp1T O/RUTuF8qLAUWFBLgrF1Ng5zDlyPEaVUK5SO1pM6dzvDwvSWOlrapmfCd3b07DI= =OslV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Ansible repo for setting up relays
by Sam Kottler 15 Jun '14

15 Jun '14

Alexander's email about the Puppet module he's putting together has reminded me to send a mail about an ansible repository I use to manage my relays. https://github.com/skottler/tor-ansible is where it lives. Unlike the puppet module, I'm working on getting a whole environment deployment put together. Ultimately (when I get some time) I'll have it stand up all the necessary pieces to securely run (i.e. ssh configuration, user setup, etc) a relay. For now it just installs Tor. Let me know if you've got any questions. Pull requests are all welcome, of course! -s

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Hash of session info was not as expected
by Logforme 14 Jun '14

14 Jun '14

My tor log file is usually quite boring but today it looks like this: Jun 14 13:42:46.000 [warn] Hash of session info was not as expected. Jun 14 13:57:56.000 [warn] Hash of session info was not as expected. Jun 14 14:11:58.000 [warn] Hash of session info was not as expected. A new line about every 10 minutes since 04:14:53 (CET) Is it a user with problems, an attack on my relay or a sign that my relay have some kind of hardware/software issues?

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Torservers herngaard issues
by grarpamp 12 Jun '14

12 Jun '14

Seems to be consistently delivering random length web pages (if they are artificially slowed such as https://berlin.craigslist.org/) and its bandwidth is tanking on globe.tpo. 3B486DEC5A22694C0960B4A97A3665C617C89B1C

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Sinkhole IPs to block for Cryptolocker and Gameover Zeus
by Adam Brenner 11 Jun '14

11 Jun '14

As you know, the Tor network can be used for mischievous and in some countries illegal activity hurting the reputation of Tor. Two of these activities include Cryptolocker[1] and Gameover Zeus[2]. Recently my exit node was inserted into a few block lists due to this two issues mentioned above and I would guess this hinders 'good' traffic within the Tor network using an exit node. I have complied a list of Sinkholes from CBL for both Cryptolocker and Gameover Zeus. Consider adding these IPs to your ExitPolicy reject list. ExitPolicy reject 85.159.211.119 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 212.71.250.4 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 54.83.43.69 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 192.42.116.41 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 192.42.119.41 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 198.98.103.253 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 208.64.121.161 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 142.0.36.234 # Cryptolocker ExitPolicy reject 173.193.197.194 # Cryptolocker [1]: http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA13-309A [2]: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-150A -- Adam Brenner <adam(a)aeb.io>

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Exit policies pointing to IP blocks not appearing on Globe
by Mendelson Gusmão 10 Jun '14

10 Jun '14

Hi! I just setup a tor relay, encouraged by EFF's Tor Challenge. All I have is a domestic connection. I've read my TOS and my ISP seems to be very friendly to this case. Although I have a little suspicion about traffic shaping, my exit node seems to be running very well! I'm worried about one thing, though. I remember that a while ago, when I tried to access Facebook using a tor client, I saw a message telling that I was blocked for using the network. To avoid the other users of my network to be blocked due to the traffic in my exit node, I managed to add exit policies rejecting every IP block that belongs to Facebook. However, these exit policies don't appear in neither globe.torproject.com nor any site that provides information about nodes. Are these addresses being scrubbed? How do I make sure that these policies being applied? Thanks!

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Running relays at consortia networks [was: JANET/edu]
by grarpamp 09 Jun '14

09 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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