August 2018 - tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Become a Fallback Directory Mirror
by Colin Childs 14 Nov '18

14 Nov '18

Hello Tor Relay Operators, Do you want your relay to be a Tor fallback directory mirror? Will it have the same address and port for the next 2 years? Just reply to this email with your relay's fingerprint. If your relay is on the current list, you don't need to do anything. If you're asking: Q: What's a fallback directory mirror? Fallback directory mirrors help Tor clients connect to the network. For more details, see [1]. Q: Is my relay on the current list? Search [2] and [3] for your relay fingerprint or IP address and port: [2] is the current list of fallbacks in Tor. [3] is used to create the next list of fallbacks. Q: What do I need to do if my relay is on the list? Keep the same IP address, keys, and ports. Email tor-relays if the relay's details change. Q: Can my relay be on the list next time? We need fast relays that will be on the same IP address and port for 2 years. Reply to this email to get on the list, or to update the details of your relay. Once or twice a year, we run a script to choose about 150-200 relays from the potential list [3] for the list in Tor [2]. Q: Why didn't my relay get on the list last time? We check a relay's uptime, flags, and speed [4]. Sometimes, a relay might be down when we check. That's ok, we will check it again next time. It's good to have some new relays on the list every release. That helps tor clients, because blocking a changing list is harder. Q. I already have a relay in the fallback list, can I add another? We will pick up to 7 relays per operator to be in the fallback list. Please send any relays that you would like considered for the fallback list. Thanks for considering and/or being a fallback directory mirror! [1]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors> [2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/src/or/fallback_dirs.inc <https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/src/or/fallback_dirs.inc> [3]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/scripts/maint/fallback.whitelist <https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/scripts/maint/fallback.whitelist> [4]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/21564/fallbacks_… <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/21564/fallbacks_…>

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IPv6 and bridges
by arisbe 07 Oct '18

07 Oct '18

Hello to you all, Question: Is there a point to adding IPv6 addresses to the ORPorts of my bridges? Will they then operate somewhat in the fashion of guards without published metrics? Any info would be helpful. Arisbe

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Announcement: Relay operator meetings on IRC
by Colin Childs 16 Sep '18

16 Sep '18

Hello Tor relay operators! Starting September 11th @ 1:00AM UTC, we will be piloting regular relay operator meetings in #tor-relays on irc.oftc.net. These meetings will be an opportunity to introduce yourself to the operator community, make new contacts and provide updates to the group on the status of your relays. This will also be an opportunity to have questions answered by a group of dedicated relay operators, community members and Tor Project staff. For everyone overseas, we will be hosting a second meeting on September 25th @ 19:00 UTC. After these initial two meetings, we will evaluate if these dates / times need to be adjusted, as well as how frequently these meetings should be run. I will send a follow-up email at the end of September with the results of that evaluation. On the Monday of meeting weeks, I will send a reminder on this list with the channel, date and time. I look forward to seeing you all there, and thank you for running relays!

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Lets increase Routing Security for Tor related BGP Prefixes
by nusenu 06 Sep '18

06 Sep '18

Hi, I measured the adoption of RPKI ROAs that help with routing security and some other properties for the >3k BGP prefixes that make up the Tor network. https://medium.com/@nusenu/how-vulnerable-is-the-tor-network-to-bgp-hijacki… You might want to jup directly to section "Recommendations for Tor Relay Operators". (I could paste it here but then all the URLs would be lost) Since OVH SAS and DO do not deploy ROAs at all yet: If you are an OVH SAS or Digital Ocean customer (directly or indirectly just on the same AS) it would be great if you could ask your customer support when they are planing to deploy RPKI ROAs (like other big hosters already did). thanks, nusenu -- https://twitter.com/nusenu_ https://mastodon.social/@nusenu

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4 of Conrad Rockenhaus trial servers are in the top ten exit relays for Canada
by zimmer linux 06 Sep '18

06 Sep '18

Hi, Just to let you know that following on with the one month trial with tor exit relays that Conrad kindly offered, at least four of his exit relays are now in the top 10 listing for Canada, out of 68 Canadian exit relays. https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:ca%20flag:exit Well done to Conrad - I say. The more, the merrier. If you want any help with setting up your own FreeBSD tor exit relay, feel free to contact me off list. Zim

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Relay operators meetup part #2 @ Onionspace, Berlin
by Vasilis 03 Sep '18

03 Sep '18

Dear Tor friends and relay operators, Next Saturday (25/08/18) a follow-up relay operators meetup will take place at Onionspace, Berlin. The meetup will start at 16:00 and depending on the weather we may move afterwards to the garden. When: Saturday, August 25th, 2018 Start Time: 16:00 / 4:00 PM Where: Gottschedstrasse 4, Entrance 4, 13357 Berlin (U Nauener Platz), Onionspace Map: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/52.54978/13.36991 Event link: https://blog.torproject.org/events/tor-friends-and-relay-operators-meetup-2… Hope to see many of you there. Cheers, ~Vasilis -- Fingerprint: 8FD5 CF5F 39FC 03EB B382 7470 5FBF 70B1 D126 0162 Pubkey: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x5FBF70B1D1260162

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Exit in Turkey blocking torproject (komm EA93C), BadExit, Node Subscription Services, Censorship
by grarpamp 02 Sep '18

02 Sep '18

This particular case receiving mentions for at least a few months... D1E99DE1E29E05D79F0EF9E083D18229867EA93C kommissarov 185.125.33.114 The relay won't [likely] be badexited because neither it nor its upstream is shown to be doing anything malicious. Simple censorship isn't enough. And except for such limited censorship, the nodes are otherwise fully useful, and provide a valuable presence inside such regions / networks. Users, in such censoring regimes, that have sucessfully connected to tor, already have free choice of whatever exits they wish, therefore such censorship is moot for them. For everyone else, and them, workarounds exist such as,,, https://onion.torproject.org/ http://yz7lpwfhhzcdyc5y.onion/ search engines, sigs, vpns, mirrors, etc Further, whatever gets added to static exitpolicy's might move out from underneath them or the censor, the censor may quit, or the exit may fail to maintain the exitpolicy's. None of which are true representation of the net, and are effectively censorship as result of operator action even though unintentional / delayed. Currently many regimes do limited censorship like this, so you'd lose all those exits too for no good reason, see... https://ooni.torproject.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_count… And arbitrarily hamper spirits, tactics, and success of volunteer resistance communities and operators in, and fighting, such regimes around the world. And if the net goes chaotic, majority of exits will have limited visibility, for which exitpolicy / badexit are hardly manageable solutions either, and would end up footshooting out many partly useful yet needed exits as well. If this situation bothers users, they can use... SIGNAL NEWNYM, New Identity, or ExcludeExitNodes. They can also create, maintain and publish lists of whatever such classes of nodes they wish to determine, including various levels of trust, contactability, verification, ouija, etc... such that others can subscribe to them and Exclude at will. They can further publish patches to make tor automatically read such lists, including some modes that might narrowly exclude and route stream requests around just those lists of censored destination:exit pairings. Ref also... https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS197328%20flag:exit https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:tr%20flag:exit In the subect situations, you'd want to show that it is in fact the exit itself, not its upstream, that is doing the censorship. Or that if fault can't be determined to the upstream or exit, what would be the plausible malicious benefit for an exit / upstream to block a given destination such that a badexit is warranted... a) Frustrate and divert off 0.001% of Turk users smart enough to use tor, chancing through tor client random exit selection of your blocking exit, off to one of the workarounds that you're equally unlikely to control and have ranked, through your exit vs one of the others tor has open? b) Prop up weird or otherwise secretly bad nodes on the net, like the hundreds of other ones out there, for which no badexit or diverse subscription services yet exist to qualify them? c) ??? Or that some large number of topsites were censored via singular or small numbers of exits / upstreams so as to be exceedingly annoying to the network users as a whole, where no other environment of such / chaotic widespread annoyance is known to exist at the same time.

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Tor Meetup Hamburg, August 31st
by Alexander Dietrich 01 Sep '18

01 Sep '18

Hi everyone, we would like to invite people interested in the Tor project and relay operators in the Hamburg area to meet at the CCC Hamburg. There will be an introduction to Tor, a Q&A session and a brief announcement about a future Hamburg-based Tor association. We would love for relay operators to meet and discuss ways of strengthening the network. When: Friday, August 31st, 6:00 PM Where: CCC Hamburg, Zeiseweg 9 ( https://hamburg.ccc.de/#wegbeschreibung ) WWW: https://hamburg.ccc.de/2018/08/20/tor-meet-up-beim-ccchh-index/ Be seeing you, Alexander -- PGP Key: https://dietrich.cx/pgp | 0x52FA4EE1722D54EB

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Abuse Complaints
by Paul Templeton 30 Aug '18

30 Aug '18

Question: are exit operators seeing many abuse complaints now days? I have only had one in the last two months from 5 exits. I used to see a lot now nothing really. I just find it weird. Paul 137CF322859E400455E457DB920F65FFDD222CDF

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log "Is your outbound address the same as your relay address?"
by Tim Kuijsten 30 Aug '18

30 Aug '18

Hi, I just setup a new relay[0]. One of the messages I got is the following: "Your relay has a very large number of connections to other relays. Is your outbound address the same as your relay address? Found 12 connections to 8 relays. Found 12 current canonical connections, in 0 of which we were a non-canonical peer. 4 relays had more than 1 connection, 0 had more than 2, and 0 had more than 4 connections." When I had setup another relay last week[1] I got the same message, and it didn't reappear so I assume this is about starting up a new relay and is nothing to worry about. I just thought I'd let you know. The hostnames of both machines matches the public dns and reverse dns names. Furthermore each machine has only one public ipv4 address, which is also set in it's local /etc/hosts file. At one machine I had set "Address" in the torrc as well, but this didn't avoid getting this message once. Kind regards, Tim [0] tosk B183A69592D2E8C8C487C054D0849E3C9561DC11 [1] kali 2C76951164C5184A3B8B7CC1914B34E4622B225F

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