- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Help the Tor Project by running a fast unpublished bridge
by Roger Dingledine 16 Aug '12

16 Aug '12

Hi folks, In addition to the "get many fast exit relays" plan, that same funder (Voice of America) wants us to run a pile of fast stable unpublished bridges. We'll give the bridge addresses out manually to their target users over the coming months. The constraints are: * 100mbit+ connectivity, though in practice I expect they will spend most of their time doing far less than that. * No more than 2 bridges per /24. If you're running fast (100mbit+) exits (which is more important), exits on that /24 count toward this 2. * No more than 7 bridges total per data center. If you could set up 1 (or 2, or 20) and send me the address(es) privately, that would be grand. We do have some funding for this, but I'm hoping that we can get enough volunteers so we can put the money toward more fast exits and better QA and build automation for the Tor bundles. So if you have good connectivity but can't run an exit, this is a great way to contribute. The torrc lines we want include: ORPort 443 # or whichever port you like BridgeRelay 1 PublishServerDescriptor 0 RelayBandwidthRate 11875 KB # or more RelayBandwidthBurst 12500 KB # or more If you have 3+ IP addresses and want to get fancy, you might set OutboundBindAddress to a different IP address than you tell me, to avoid some of the bridge enumeration attacks listed at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/research-problems-ten-ways-discover-tor-br… Later I might ask you to set up some sort of server-side pluggable transport like obfsproxy, but there's no rush on that. Long-term, "get a bunch of fast bridges on individual static IP addresses" is not a very good plan. Instead, we plan to focus on borrowing whole netblocks from ISPs and other people who aren't using them, and redirecting the addresses en masse into a bridge. You can start playing around with this idea by using an iptables rule rather than a bridge: /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 18.244.0.114 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 128.31.0.34:9032 if the bridge listens on 128.31.0.34:9032 and you want me to advertise the address 18.244.0.114:80. Let me know if you have any questions or I can help clarify anything. Thanks! --Roger

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Exit Port Usage Statistics for "Allow all" nodes
by Moritz Bartl 16 Aug '12

16 Aug '12

Hi, At torservers.net, we run some large exit relays with an "allow all except port 25" policy. These are statistics from ARM showing exit port statistics of a fast exit running for seven hours at 30-40 MB/s: 443 HTTPS 17650 (%55) 80 HTTP 10625 (%33) 8344 739 (%2) 8333 84 51413 45 6881 Torrent 38 8337 29 993 IMAPS 23 45682 18 182 16 9001 16 4662 eMule 14 4661 12 -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/

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Using aes-in in Tor
by tor-admin 15 Aug '12

15 Aug '12

Hi, I am struggling setting up aes-in support with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I enabled aes in bios. cat /proc/cpuinfo shows the aes flag. #lsmod |grep aes aesni_intel 55664 0 cryptd 20530 1 aesni_intel aes_x86_64 17208 1 aesni_intel shows that the module is loaded. But #openssl engine (rsax) RSAX engine support (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support shows not the aes engine. My openssl version is #openssl version OpenSSL 1.0.1 14 Mar 2012 Can someone give me a hint what I am doing wrong. Regards, Torland

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Unnamed flag
by kupo＠damnfbi.tk 15 Aug '12

15 Aug '12

Can anyone explain how to get the Unnamed flag for my node changed over to Named? -kupo

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Martin Algö 15 Aug '12

15 Aug '12

Hi Roger, Thanks for your answer :) It's funny that you mention dfri.se, because they e-mailed me (and all swedish relay operators i believe) yesterday and I'm lurking in their IRC channel (and #tor) as I write this. I also managed to join the tor-relays list, so I've had a lot to read lately. I'm CC'ing this to them as well, so let's see if it gets to where it's supposed to. :) Cheers! //Martin 2012/8/14 Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> > (Adding the tor-assistants cc back in -- I'm not so good at handling > mail to me directly, and tor-assistants is a closed list of other Tor > developers, so hopefully it isn't too impolite to add it.) > > On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 12:42:03PM +0200, Martin Algö wrote: > > Hello Roger, > > > > My answers first: > > > > - What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth > > do you get for that? > > I'm running my relay from home. I have a 100Mbit connection and for that > i > > pay roughly $65 USD (450 SEK). > > > > - Is it a stable hosting situation? For example, how do they handle > > abuse complaints so far? > > So far I've been running my relay for about 18 months. The Tor server > uses > > a total of about 50Mbit constantly in both directions (I limited it > because > > I want some bandwidth for myself as well) and I have not heard a peep > from > > my ISP. It should be noted that my ISP (Bahnhof, Sweden) have been known > > for engaging in discussions about privacy in general and trying to > protect > > their users from things like ACTA/IPRED. They even supply their own > > anonymity VPN service. > > I tried contacting them once to talk about Tor, but whoever at helpdesk > > that got my email didn't know what I was talking about so I gave that up, > > thinking that I shouldnt rock the boat unless necessary. :) > > Great. I wish there were more people like you in Sweden. :) > > > - Is your hosting situation one where it could make sense for us to > > reimburse your bandwidth costs? (Some people have a deal through their > > employer, friend, etc where they don't pay for hosting.) > > Yes. In my case, I use half my bandwidth and so it would make sense to > pay > > me half my connection fee. Something that I would like much more though, > > would be a promise of economic assistance in case of juridical problems. > > The way i see it, I don't give any money to charity, such as Red Cross > etc. > > but I contribute bandwidth for a value of $30-35 every month to help > > anonymity and uncensored access to the internet for user that need it. > > (Along with users that use it for bad things as well, but that is a > > tradeoff I'm willing to make for now.) > > Good idea. Do you know about dfri.se? They are running some fast exit > relays in Sweden in an organized way. I bet they could help with the > legal side. I agree that it would be great to have some equivalent of the > Tor Legal FAQ written with Sweden in mind. I'm cc'ing Linus (from dfri) > in case he has any thoughts here. > > > relay if you didn't have to pay for it? > > This is an interesting question! Maybe I could buy a VPS somewhere? I'm > the > > local "IT guy" at my office so I might be able to buy a separate > connection > > there and even get some cheap hardware. This defenitely could require > some > > thinking on my part. > > Let us know if anything comes to mind, and what we can do to help. > > > - What else should we be asking here? :) > > What do the relay operators want? :) > > As stated above, for me it would mean much more to have some legal help > to > > fall back on if (when) shit hits the fan. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing > > that many would-be high speed relay operators don't run relays because of > > possible legal imlications. > > Right. Do you know good Swedish lawyers who might be able to help > clarify how the laws there work? > > > I would love to join the discussion on the tor-relays list. I already > > registered, but I never got around to using any mailing lists before, so > > I'm not sure how to respond to your thread without breaking anything. > Help > > a n00b will you? :) > > Happy to help. I'd say just send the mail and see what happens. If > you start with "I run a fast exit relay, and", I expect people will be > very friendly. > > Thanks! > --Roger > >

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Sizing, Pricing, Effect
by Dennis Ljungmark 06 Aug '12

06 Aug '12

Hi! [Hypothetical part below] We have been involved with our ISP and there may ( discussions will have to wait until after summer vacation is over when we can find real numbers and answers) but it looks as if it'd cost us ~800€ / month to go from ~1GBit to 10GBit connection. If funding was available, this would be 9.5 GBit dedicated to Tor as Exit node + relays depending on what needs people have. [End hypothetical] Even without funding, we are still looking at transforming (some) of our existing relay nodes into Exit nodes, and there's a few practical questions here. Would you rather have several smaller ones, spread out via DHCP allocated ranges, or is it preferrable to have one or a handful of "larger" exit nodes? Regards, D.S. Ljungmark

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tcmalloc in FreeBSD
by Jordi Espasa Clofent 06 Aug '12

06 Aug '12

Hi all, From time to time my tor node (minibofh) stopped to work properly; since it's a tiny FreeBSD VPS, the root origin was some CPU over-consumption. I'm taking some actions to fix it (more swap, freeing CPU from another services... etc). The FreeBSD tor port offers to you the tcmalloc compilation option, so I had some fun reading this interesting paper: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html I recompiled the tor port but just using the tcmalloc option. Actually, now I got the google-perftool package and, obviously, the tcmalloc library: mb# pkg_info | grep google google-perftools-1.8.3 Fast, multi-threaded malloc() and nifty performance analysi mb# pkg_info -L google-perftools-1.8.3 | grep malloc.so /usr/local/lib/libtcmalloc.so /usr/local/lib/libtcmalloc.so.2 But, when I'm checking which libraries the tor binary is using, I get: mb# ldd /usr/local/bin/tor /usr/local/bin/tor: libz.so.5 => /lib/libz.so.5 (0x281aa000) libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5 (0x281bc000) libevent-2.0.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/event2/libevent-2.0.so.6 (0x2844e000) libssl.so.7 => /usr/local/lib/libssl.so.7 (0x28489000) libcrypto.so.7 => /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.so.7 (0x284d7000) libthr.so.3 => /lib/libthr.so.3 (0x281df000) libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x28090000) So... I understand that the tor binary is actually NOT using the new tcmalloc library. Am I wrong? PS. I adding a CC to tor FreeBSD port mantainer.

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Re: [tor-relays] [tor-assistants] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Andrew Beveridge 05 Aug '12

05 Aug '12

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: TechFix LTD <andrew(a)techfixuk.com> Date: Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:25 AM Subject: Re: [tor-assistants] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays To: Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> Cc: tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> wrote: > Sounds like you should bump it up to 100mbit then. ;) > Heh, I've just done exactly that - well, I've raised the bandwidth limits in my torrc to values higher than what my ISP caps my connection at. Just to clarify though, is there any technical reason why it would be better practice to have a realistic configured limit (like 12.5MB) as the limit rather than something higher than that which I know will likely never actually be possible? I simply want to use all the bandwidth available. I'll monitor the websites I'm hosting from this server closely for a while and see if they are noticeably affected by this at all. They are hosted from a separate VM and I'm not sure how the OpenVZ host schedules packets going through the virtual network adapters, but I'm hoping that tor can run at maximum capacity most of the time while only adding perhaps a second or two of load time onto the websites. > You can see on http://atlas.torproject.org/#details/FA02311AF49EB663CA2685A8604C403A9E10E6… that there are periods where your rate limiting is bottlenecking traffic. I presume you're referring to the busy periods where the graph clips? Sure, but as my company pays for the server entirely, if it were to not function for its intended purpose (basic hosting of small-time client websites) I would have a problem. I was worried that allowing tor to use all my bandwidth would cause that, but I hadn't actually experimented with it to see - I'm doing that now! > > I definitely don't want Tor to be in the middle of the transactions -- if Tor pays the bills directly, that's too much like being the relay operator. One nice situation would be for you to produce receipts showing expenses, and then we reimburse those costs. It requires fronting a bit of money on your part, but that's part of saving the world, yes? :) > Ultimately, we're also going to want to look into reducing overhead on Tor's side from sending out money. If we have to write and mail 50 checks every month, that's going to waste a lot of somebody's time. Maybe that means Paypal is the way to go. Maybe it means we send some money in bulk to Zwiebelfreunde, and they do intra-Europe wire transfers to the other Europeans (though I admit maybe that just shifts the time-wasting). Lots of options there. What would be best for you? Good point. I guess the solution which seems logical to me would be a standing order from Tor into my company account for the amount mentioned above, with my OVH invoice emailed to you as justification. As the amount would not change from month to month, a standing order could be set up once and never require any more attention unless I got cut off by OVH. Presumably that would require a european bank account under Tor's control - I'm not sure about how your connection with the Wau Holland Foundation works, but are they perhaps able to help with european transfers? If that is too awkward, then sure, PayPal (or one of several other e-Payment systems) is a fairly easy way to go about it, with the loss of a few % of the payment amount. My business currently uses PayPal for all payments from US entities, simply because it is easy. > All of this said, don't go out and start spending money quite yet. We should figure out these logistics first. And Tor should get a bit more of a handle on what this diversity thing should mean. And I should get buy-in from other Tor people for my plans here. :) > --Roger > I'm going to try my best to run my current node as a full 100Mbit node from now on anyway, even if that means paying for more traffic. As soon as things are ready at your end, I'm ready to start a second identical exit as described in my previous mail. I'm going to try and start looking for other providers, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel - is https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs kept up to date by many people here? Perhaps we could develop a slightly better system for tracking good/bad ISP experiences than a flat wiki page with countries? So my node has been running without any bandwidth restriction for a few days now, and I'm not noticing any critical speed problems from the websites I host. The latency drops significantly when the node is pushing traffic at max bandwidth, but that doesn't seem to be very often ( https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/FA02311AF49EB663CA2685A8604C403A9E10E… ). So, as it stands right now, I'm happy to run that node for free as I already have been. If the OVH manager decides I am very close to my initial 10TB traffic cap, I will have to limit the node again unless I can get some funding (£9-£18) for another 20TB each month. Out of curiosity, can anyone explain to me why my bandwidth /hasn't/ been maxed out the past few days? (at least, according to Atlas) -- * Andrew Beveridge, **Tor lurker / sympathizer / advocate, exit node maintainer.* Director / Computer Repair Technician @ TechFix LTD [ http://www.techfixuk.com] Freelance Web Developer @ [http://www.andrewbeveridge.co.uk] Tel/Fax: +44 (0) 1383269735 | * Email: tor(a)techfixuk.com <andrew(a)techfixuk.com> * * 5 Drum Road, Kelty, KY4 0DQ, Scotland *

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Re: [tor-relays] task-6329 / tor relays stats patch
by Karsten Loesing 03 Aug '12

03 Aug '12

Hi Michael, I'm cc'ing tor-relays for the discussion here, because I figured if you're okay with sharing the patch, you're probably also okay with a public discussion of it. :) On 7/21/12 4:19 PM, Michael Zeltner wrote: > Hi Karsten, > > On my way out, and I would otherwise forget but here you go, maybe you'd like > this. > > Best from Metalab/Vienna, > Michael Thanks for sending the patch! Most of it looks good, but I took out the --family-for-fp option which, I think, isn't entirely correct. This option looks for relays having the given fingerprint in their family line, but it doesn't cross-check if the given relay has those relays in its family line, too. The option also doesn't look at nicknames (of relays with the Named flag) in family lines, which means it might miss some family members. Oh, and it would be really cool to have a -F or --by-family option to aggregate by families. I wonder if we should do the whole family-calculating business inside Onionoo and add a family_number field which has the same number for relays in the same family. The script could then look up the family number of the given relay and display all relays with that family number. Would that make sense? Want to extend the script once Onionoo has such a field? Thanks! Karsten

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Andrew Beveridge 03 Aug '12

03 Aug '12

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> wrote: > Hello Andrew, > > I wanted to draw your attention to a thread I've started on the tor-relays > list: > https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-July/001433.html > > Hi Roger, I'm not too familiar with mailing lists, so hopefully I'm not top posting or replying in the wrong place here. I'm simply replying to your email in Gmail with a CC to the tor-relays list. Sorry for the late reply, I've been away with no internet access for the past week. > In short, we have a funder who wants to sponsor more and faster Tor > exits, and we're brainstorming about how to use the money in a way that > makes the network stronger but also doesn't screw up the "community" > side of the Tor relay operator community. The first step is collecting > facts about the current fast Tor exit relays. > > Great! I've not been vocal in the Tor community before now, but I'd like to start, and I'm certainly happy to share my experience / thoughts. > - What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth > do you get for that? > This is a complicated question, because I run a single Tor exit in a VPS on my company dedicated server. I run a local company doing computer repair and web development, and lease a single dedicated server from OVH (more specifically, Kimsufi) for a total of £64 a month (inc. VAT). That gets me the Kimsufi 16G dedicated server, a RIPE block of 4 extra IPs, and an external 2TB HDD. 100Mbit pipe, 10TB/month bandwidth. £0.87/TB if I go over that, so if I were to max out the bandwidth for an entire month, using around 30TB traffic, I would have to pay about £18 on top for the extra bandwidth. However, according to the OVH manager I never seem to go anywhere near the traffic limit, despite having had the exit set to use 50Mbit/s constantly for the past 3 months. As far as I'm concerned, it costs me nothing to run this exit node - my company needs the dedicated server regardless, and none of the ~50 websites I host use enough traffic to be affected by the fact that my server is using half it's available bandwidth for Tor. In an ideal world, I would rent a second Kimsufi server just for Tor purposes, which would cost £36/month (Kimsufi 16G) + £4/month (RIPE block). Therefore, if I were to participate in this experiment, I would say *£40 GBP / month* would get *10TB of 100 Mbit/s* exit traffic. Additional *20TB* traffic could be purchased for *£18 / month*, which would bring the maximum cost to *$92 USD / month.* > - Is it a stable hosting situation? For example, how do they handle > abuse complaints so far? > This is an important one, because OVH are not Tor-friendly. In fact, they aren't very friendly in general! Several people told me it was very foolish to run an exit node on an OVH server, since as soon as OVH get even a whiff of a complaint, they are quick to suspend. All my company-hosted websites are hosted on a second redundant server with another ISP so I'm not worried if OVH do find out and take that route and cut me off. I'm also not worried about legal issues, as I have positioned myself as a web-hosting customer of my own PLC, with terms and conditions absolving my PLC of any legal risks. In the off chance some legal authority were to come to my flat in britain, they would find no electrical equipment to seize as I own only a single laptop and it usually lives in my car or partners house anyway! As I have only been running this exit for 3 months, I am far from an authoritative voice on the issue of abuse complaints, but the most important thing is definitely SWIP as far as I can see it - the IP address I use for the exit is one from the RIPE block I lease and as such the abuse email is my own. I've had about 20 abuse report emails so far, all automated (by the looks of things) from some system within the brazilian government, following an Sqlmap SQL injection scan/attack on a few government sites. I replied to the first one with the standard template, got no reply, haven't worried about it since. I reckon if OVH found out I was running an exit they would be likely to cut me off fairly swiftly, but they don't seem to pay much attention to Kimsufi customers since it is their budget range with very slow (week+ per ticket) support and presumably low margins. I think that and me as the primary abuse contact for the IP mean it's likely to stay up for a while. If I do get any hassle, I'll defend it as far as I can from a business perspective, but if they don't give in I'll likely just cancel it and open a new Kimsufi lease - I very much doubt anyone is checking new invoices for similar details to past customers. > - Is your hosting situation one where it could make sense for us to > reimburse your bandwidth costs? (Some people have a deal through their > employer, friend, etc where they don't pay for hosting.) > I don't think so - as explained above, at present I don't pay a penny, but I can only offer about half of my available bandwidth as the server is used for many purposes. If I were to participate in this experiment, it would probably mean purchasing another Kimsufi just for this, and the cost of the server itself would be what I would be looking for financial help with. > - Are you in a position to get more bandwidth if you pay more? At what > rates? We're most interested in sponsoring >=100mbit relays. > Unfortunately the Kimsufi servers are capped at 100Mbit regardless of whether you want to pay more. OVH obviously have Gbit and 10Gbit servers available, but they are too expensive for this. There are obviously far better alternatives for higher bandwidth servers - a quick look tells me I could get a 1Gbit dedicated server with 100TB traffic from Leaseweb for €99 ($121) / month, so obviously if the money is there, more bandwidth and traffic can be had. I guess it boils down to how many people you can get interested in this - if plenty, lots of 100Mbit servers is presumably better than a few 10Gbit ones for the money as it aids network diversity, even if (worst case) they are all hosted by the same provider. > - Do you have other locations in mind where you would run another exit > relay if you didn't have to pay for it? > Definitely! As far as I'm concerned, I am not worried about legal issues as long as I can purchase hosting through my business and SWIP the IP, and I have plenty of free time to spend configuring servers and responding to abuse emails, so if I had the money I would happily be running exit nodes in any country I could find a hosting provider in - money is the hurdle for me. > - What else should we be asking here? :) > One thing which I haven't seen discussed yet is how funding would actually be connected with operators - I'm not sure if you were thinking about the funder(s) directly sending money to operators, or if The Tor Project Inc would be acting as a middleman? What money transfer mechanisms would be safe to use, how would you verify that the money was going to the right person, would The Tor Project Inc receive invoices directly from hosting companies or would operators email copies of invoices to someone and then some money would turn up in their bank accounts? What about PayPal, etc? Just a few thoughts :) Thanks! > --Roger Thanks for inviting me to share my thoughts on this! -Andrew

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Domain name based policies (was: Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays)
by Nicolas Braud-Santoni 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

2012/8/1 Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu>: > On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:21:01AM +0100, mick wrote: >> Question for tor developers. How hard would it be to change the logic >> (and syntax) of exit policy in tor to allow domain based formulations >> like: >> >> reject *.gmail.com >> reject *aol.com > > Very hard. > > https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#Exitpoliciesshould… Hi, While I see how allowing wildcards and domains in policies would be more than challenging, wouldn't it be possible to : - resolve domain-names at Tor startup, and get all associated A and AAAA records - Repeat when record's TTL is reached. Of course, it wouldn't work for sites that don't advertise all their IPs. It would also require the Exit node's operator to run some DNS resolver (or trust an external one), but locally running unbound (for example) is quite simple. Moreover, the risk evoked in the FAQ is already present : if I poison an exit node's DNS resolver, wouldn't I be able to replace nytimes.com A record with some bogon, like 0.0.0.0 ? Nicolas

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Scott Bennett 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

On Fri, 27 Jul 2012 01:23:57 -0400 grarpamp <grarpamp(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> 4) What exactly do we mean by diversity? >> >> I would look at this almost entirely from a jurisdictional and ISP level. I >> believe the biggest "sudden impact" threats to the tor network are going to >> be from legal changes (jurisdictional, i.e. "save the children, nullroute >> the nodes") and local business policy changes ("sorry tor customers, no more >> tor egress from our DC due to complaints"). > >I'm not sure which thread I mentioned this on so I'll put it here to be sure. >I think one main thing needed is a project to catalog all the current >exits as to their diversity... >Box: ISP/hoster, AS, datacenter, country, upstream AS/Tier-n path, >relay-operator >Relay-operator: country > >Without that, seems like placing nodes amounts to, 'Well, >we don't have any in Iran, let's go there'. If it turns out that >IP is more or less fed as a courtesy from UAE across the >gulf, there's not much gain. Repeat analysis for any of the >above parameters. > >More nodes are probably good, just not all as USA, Equinix, >Level3, with whatever hoster has a rack in all the DC's. I agree completely. But I would also like to add that, aside from Brasil, most of South America is still dark. Central America is not much better either. Many of those states are not especially cooperative with each other, politically speaking, yet they all need the benefits of commerce associated with the Internet. That combination strikes me as beneficial to placement of tor relays in as many of those countries as possible. Much of Africa may be worth closer examination for the same reasons. We really need to keep political diversity in view, especially given the large fractions of the tor network currently concentrated inside a mere handful of politically allied states. The Dictator of the U.S., for example, has already made the threat of shutting down the entire U.S. portion of the Internet, including relaying between other countries, which would certainly have a severely disruptive effect upon tor users all around the globe were it to happen under today's distribution of tor relays. Even more drastic would be if any of, for example, the U.K., France, Germany, or the Netherlands were to follow suit. Having countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador more tor-populated looks to me like a good thing. Another point I'd like to make is that I don't see why having one 100 MB/s relay is somehow better than having ten 10 MB/s relays or 20 5 MB/s relays. The superhigh-speed relays push operating system limits on the number of connections. Due to tor's design, distributing the workload of such relays across multiple CPU cores is problematic. Olaf Selke got around that problem by running four nodes on a quad-core machine with two IP addresses, but that meant that each node usually ran at less than 15 MB/s. For a superfast setup today, it might mean running multiple 25 MB/s nodes in similar fashion to what Olaf did, rather than a single 100 MB/s node. The benefit to tor users would seem to me to be the same either way, but the multinode method would not satisfy the demand of the funding source, as I understood it. Either way, though, the operating system limits may place keep a lid on the actual tor capacity of a very fast setup. From an infrastructure standpoint, I acknowledge that there can be problems in setting up really fast relays in Latin American countries. However, adding a few relays on the order of 500 - 5,000 KB/s in each Latin American country could probably be done, even if it meant they could only be set up in national capitals, which are mostly megalopolises of several million people, and might involve making special arrangements with the ISPs. Other major cities in some countries may also have the infrastructure to make moderately fast relays possible. Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ********************************************************************** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * *--------------------------------------------------------------------* * "A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army." * * -- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * **********************************************************************

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How to protect yourself from network scanning
by amki 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

Hiho, I am hosting a 3-5MB/s tor exit relay but as of today my hoster has closed my server because of network scanning. Is there a known proper way to protect yourself from being used as a network scan relay? I've thought about constructing iptables rules to limit the number of SYN packets for the same host per second or such, but I'm not sure if this is allowed or will get me flagged as a bad exit node. My hoster is quite ok with us generating some abuse complaints per month, but does not want to route network scanning traffic since it is a severe load to their routers. Any help would be appreciated Cheers amki -- "Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you." - Carl Sagan

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Steve Snyder 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

Roger Dingledine arma at mit.edu Mon Jul 23 18:58:54 UTC 2012 [snip] >At the same time, much of our performance improvement comes from better >load balancing -- that is, concentrating traffic on the relays that can >handle it better. The result though is a direct tradeoff with relay >diversity: on today's network, clients choose one of the fastest 5 exit >relays around 25-30% of the time, and 80% of their choices come from a >pool of 40-50 relays. [snip] From what I see on the TorStatus pages (torstatus.all.de, blutmagie.de) about a third of the roughly 3000 relays listed are at or below 64KB/sec of demonstrated bandwidth. No doubt some of these are soon-to-be-high-bandwidth servers that are just ramping up, and some are nodes having transitory networking problems. It seems reasonable to assume, though, that most of these low-bandwidth nodes are intentionally low-bandwidth, perhaps on the basis of the Tor doc stating a 20KB/sec minimum. With "80% of their choices come from a pool of 40-50 relays" that leaves a 20% chance for the remaining 2950 nodes. A case for low-bandwidth nodes can be made as a means to dissuade anticipated routing (due to pool size), but it seems from the stats quoted above that there is little chance that 2000+ of these 3000 nodes will ever carry Tor traffic, and thus can be ignored for purposes of traffic analysis. Is there any justification for a low-bandwidth Tor node? And if so, what is the practical minimum bandwidth needed to actually see any traffic?

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Roger Dingledine 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 05:49:34AM -0400, Motoko Kusanagi wrote: > I am very interested in running 100 Mbit (maybe even more) exit nodes at 100$/month, however, a question immediately comes to mind: > When we say "100Mbit exit node", do we imply "really unmetered" traffic at 100 Mbit, or do we mean "semi-reasonable traffic limit at 100Mbit speed". > "Really unlimited", in my experience, oftentimes turns out to be somewhat problematic. I don't think we necessarily need to have the 100mbit all to ourselves (see the other discussions here about shared connections), but I think it needs to be able to push a good fraction of 100mbit throughout the month. So something that can handle 20-30TB/mo is in the right ballpark. Note that many of our current 100mbit nodes are actually gbit nodes that try to limit themselves to a long-term average (95th percentile) of 100mbit. > I could arrange for 50-100 100Mbit exit nodes running 24/7, with a >traffic limit somewhere between 1 and 4 terabytes (will need to scrutinize >my current contract and do some math). Arranging for such a number of >"honestly unlimited traffic at 100Mbit speed" would be...significantly >more problematic. 4TB/mo is good for a 10mbit connection, but not good for a 100mbit connection. You'll end up either needing to hibernate for 80% of the month, or rate limit your relays down a lot. That said, we don't need 50-100 100mbit exit relays from any single group. Just 5-10 would be nice. Maybe that makes the capacity issue easier? --Roger

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Re: [tor-relays] Negative impact of MaxOnionsPending 250?
by Scott Bennett 31 Jul '12

31 Jul '12

On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:11:17 +0200 Moritz Bartl <moritz(a)torservers.net> wrote: >We sometimes see "Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit >creation requests!" on our servers. Scott Bennett suggested to set >MaxOnionsPending to 250 instead of the default of 100, which at least >makes the warnings disappear. [1] > >I am thinking about modifying out torrc template we use as as basis for >all servers. What is the negative impact of setting MaxOnionsPending to >250? Should we instead reduce the bandwidth as suggested in the warning? I don't think so. To the best of my recollection, I've only seen this message in recent versions of tor when it appeared that my node had been chosen for one or more high-volume hidden service operations, where the traffic volume in B/s was still fairly low, yet the number of connections had suddenly climbed to an unusually high level. The data throughput capacity vastly exceeded the actual traffic, but the onionskin-decoding load was sometimes, but probably not continually, very high until the hidden service(s) either shut down or changed their advertised information in the hidden service directory. To lower my node's RelayBandwidth* values would most likely have little impact on the bottleneck. Raising MaxOnionsPending adds a little slack in the queue to handle the occasions where that activity is temporarily backlogged prevents dropped connections and allows operations to proceed normally with only minimal extra delays. Consider a delay of probably no more than a second at the outside and usually less versus the delay of building a new circuit to a hidden service due to a dropped connection. > >[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-May/001352.html Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ********************************************************************** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * *--------------------------------------------------------------------* * "A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army." * * -- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * **********************************************************************

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Zac Lym 30 Jul '12

30 Jul '12

This seems (to me) like an obvious suggestion, so my apologies if it's already been thought up. Why not establish a team/scoreboard system, like those used for distributed computing and BitCoin mining? This elegantly solves a few problems while with minimal resource commitment from the Tor organization. Most importantly, it's a way to pump money into the system without ruining the current atmosphere. Sponsors could easily buy some bandwidth or people can also just donate their own connections and join a particular team. The scoreboard is based on goodwill, not dollars spent. It also eliminates the hassle of setting prices, as teams can compete for dollars and bandwidth provided, essentially setting their own prices. The org could also setup a payment system, like we-pay, that the team admins can configure to deposit funds. It could be set as a proof of work system, paying after the bandwidth has been provided. This also allows a degree of control to prevent abuse from admins trying to juice stats by abusing some network infrastructure, like dummy trial accounts on hosting sites. A group admin could block specific hosts or the Tor project could remove an entire group. Finally, this could allow for the Tor project to create metrics based on things other than speed, akin to how Folding@home scores GPU and CPU contributions differently. Then the project can set anonymity goals for the network (such as location, ISP, backbone provider, etc) and the volunteers will adjust their patterns accordingly. Finally, I would like to strongly suggest taking a cut of all donations to pay for the new infrastructure and Tor research and development. I wouldn't want development to slow on Tor because donations are going to bandwidth instead. Indeed, I would prefer we spend a ton of money on the stenography efforts and usability. Anyway, thanks for the hard work! -Zach Lym

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nickname to fingerprint
by Aichetou Med 28 Jul '12

28 Jul '12

hello tor community my question is : is there an "easy" way to translate relay nickname to fingerprint ? if not is it possible to download descriptors for some specific relays given "Digest" string from consensus file? i mean before launching tor. besides is there a reason for not showing the fingerprint in the consensus. thank you :)

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Script to get top relays, AS and countries weights
by delber 27 Jul '12

27 Jul '12

Hi! Attached is a pretty simple Python script to compute some statistics about relays. Here's the doc: Usage: tor-relays-stats.py <output> [args ...] Where <output> is one of: - countries [FLAGS] relative percentage of the consensus in each countries - as-sets [FLAGS] [COUNTRIES] relative percentage of the consensus in each AS sets - top [COUNT] [FLAGS] [COUNTRIES] top relays according their place in the whole consensus Examples: - To get the top five exit nodes in France: tor-relays-stats.py top 5 Exit fr - To get weights of each AS of all relays in Germany: tor-relays-stats.py as-sets Running de Maybe it has flaws. Maybe it should land in some Git repository. I just felt it might be of interest to other folks. Feel free to comment and hack. -- delber

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Negative impact of MaxOnionsPending 250?
by Moritz Bartl 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

Hi, We sometimes see "Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests!" on our servers. Scott Bennett suggested to set MaxOnionsPending to 250 instead of the default of 100, which at least makes the warnings disappear. [1] I am thinking about modifying out torrc template we use as as basis for all servers. What is the negative impact of setting MaxOnionsPending to 250? Should we instead reduce the bandwidth as suggested in the warning? [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-May/001352.html -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/

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High speed Relays/Exit nodes
by Dennis Ljungmark 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

Hi, We're currently running 6 different 100-200Mbit relay/guard nodes, and are looking at some issues moving on towards high performant exit nodes. There are some administrative issues ( needing another IP block due to the RIPE registration, our ISP doesn't want their name on the exit nodes that we are responsible for ) which are generally minor ( are being resolved anyhow ) and then the big stumbling block. Right now, with iptables modifications ( raw tables hacks to disable conntrack, bucket increases, following the general best practices ) our firewall is running at high amounts of CPU, but coping. However, once we start introducing Exit Nodes into this equation, things turn sour. So, since we do not want to trust only routing level separation between Exit Nodes and internal networks, we're going to have to invest into new hardware that can cope with this. Before this, we tried Ingate firewalls, and they weren't capable of coping with the load of guard nodes. ( The traditional "linux box in front" doesn't quite cut it due to networking hardware in most cases. ) So, in summary, when you get to the point of actively dealing with 8-900Mbps of Tor traffic ( on top of normal users and others) what hardware is needed to cope with firewalling? Regards, D.S. Ljungmark

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Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Sriakhil Gogineni 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

Hello! I saw this posted on slashdot and think this is an excellent way to donate some of our time and expertise, especially considering Internet access has been declared a human right by the UN. We currently colocate with a provider and will be inquiring with them if they are OK with hosting Tor, (the post here: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-minimal-harassment was extremely helpful for other just joining and we will be following such advice when we bring it up with our provider). Ball park quotes we got were 99$ / 100 Mbps or $599 / 1000 Mbps for transit for a single 1U... we'll see if we can get something better... Would this be helpful / viable option for a Tor exit node ? I also had just one question: what are the specs required for a Tor node? It does not seem too resource intensive but I have not been able to find any minimum system requirements. Would a current / last-generation quad core with 8GB + would suffice? Best, Sri

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Paid exit nodes
by Brock Tice 25 Jul '12

25 Jul '12

Hi, I saw the story on Slashdot. I currently run an exit node (anfanillc) with a bandwidth limit. I have a decent uplink, though in bandwidth tests I see closer to 40 Mbps than 100 Mbps. I think $100/month would be plenty to defray the costs of removing the bandwidth limit. Maybe even less, I can talk with my ISP. I'm not charged for bandwidth right now, but my DC has to pay the ISP for it. I've already got my IP SWIPed and all that good stuff. Prior to this I've run exit nodes on and off for years without too much trouble, mostly DMCA takedowns. --Brock

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How many PK operations does a typical home-run relay or bridge do in 24 hours?
by Karsten Loesing 18 Jul '12

18 Jul '12

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi relay and bridge operators, want to help us design hardware capabilities of a Torouter device? At the Florence hackfest I was asked for the typical number of RSA operations performed by a relay or bridge, say, per day. We're mostly interested in home-run relays and bridges on DSL lines and similar, because that's where Torouter devices will be deployed, too. So, Amunet and TorServers are out here. :) Tor has a built-in feature to count PK operations. If one sends a USR1 signal to the tor process, it writes a line like this to its log file (though this line comes from a client): Jul 10 18:31:22.904 [info] PK operations: 0 directory objects signed, 0 directory objects verified, 0 routerdescs signed, 2968 routerdescs verified, 216 onionskins encrypted, 0 onionskins decrypted, 30 client-side TLS handshakes, 0 server-side TLS handshakes, 0 rendezvous client operations, 0 rendezvous middle operations, 0 rendezvous server operations. The number we're most interested in is "onionskins decrypted," but maybe there are other high numbers that are worth considering. If you run a relay or bridge at home, run these four steps: 1. Make sure the relay or bridge is running for at least 24 hours (longer is fine, shorter may skew results) 2. Send the process a USR1 signal, e.g., kill -USR1 $pid 3. Look for the log line above 4. Reply to this email with a) the relay's or bridge's nickname, b) the first four hex characters of its fingerprint, c) the log time and timezone, d) the top-3 PK operations by numbers. An example result could be: gabelmoo F204 Jul 10 18:31:22.904 CEST 12345 onionskins decrypted 2968 routerdescs verified 216 onionskins encrypted Thanks for your help! Once I have some results, I'll look up relays and bridges in the descriptor archive and post results to this list. Of course, if someone has more thoughts on measuring how many PK ops a relay or bridge does, please say so! :) Thanks, Karsten -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQAAjVAAoJEEk5d4GsWvIjWbMH/ilEf4dQrWqdFuZ5lYlWBnSb PAd/ru2ygGFswW4CeWWNKNnkxVd+Dcd9smVjVcpUIxlrEeMXzrZqsICre992Cjsd RjyXBnKIdwInwdVOi5ZyuWbmozCTbn5Oh3Bd47XFMDLNZIgC9itCdlGkU9Mw6bKB KO7QfbtQCTjlBEe/4mYmpW4/H+NaG5V8b3ByWtuAJz614cxckPgR2UxnEtYQXm7p TCRh/FC2jnc+7MrQZxBd6V6zLrudtdLCNLwdchGt7YBPMV3tyryvV6q/8v9ZY5jP VQTW6pKb5kVH1drL4M7oCJtt7bDnxhOGg76C7uBjWiXoaYUp4zyfeTdc57FkreM= =4Ex+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: [tor-relays] SocksPort flags trouble
by Scott Bennett 17 Jul '12

17 Jul '12

On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:34:08 -0400 Nick Mathewson <nickm(a)freehaven.net> wrote: >On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 12:07 AM, Scott Bennett <bennett(a)cs.niu.edu> wrote: >> On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:33:52 -0400 Nick Mathewson <nickm(a)freehaven.net> >> wrote: >>>On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Scott Bennett <bennett(a)cs.niu.edu> wrote: >>>> While testing my torrc with 0.2.3.18-rc, I tried adding the >>>> IsolateDestAddr flag to the SocksPort line, as in >>>> >>>> SocksPort 9050 IsolateDestAddr >>>> >>>> A "tor --verify-config" claimed that I was trying to specify more >>>> than one port on that line, which would be an error. Are the SocksPort >>>> flags listed in the tor man page for 0.2.3.18-rc not yet implemented? >>> >>>Just tried it with 0.2.3.18-rc (as tagged in git), using only that >>>option. It worked for me. Could you have had some other tor in your >>>path as "tor", or something like that? >>> >> No. Here's sample output. >> >> Script started on Mon Jul 16 22:56:43 2012 >> >> [hellas] 74 % sudo -u _tor tor --verify-config >> Jul 16 22:57:03.186 [notice] Tor v0.2.3.18-rc running on FreeBSD. >> Jul 16 22:57:03.187 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://www.torproject.org/download/download#warning >> Jul 16 22:57:03.211 [notice] Read configuration file "/usr/local/etc/tor/torrc". >> Jul 16 22:57:03.256 [warn] SocksListenAddress can only be used with a single SocksPort with value "auto" or 1-65535. >> Jul 16 22:57:03.256 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Invalid SocksPort/SocksListenAddress configuration >> Jul 16 22:57:03.256 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above. >> [hellas] 75 % exit >> exit >> >> Script done on Mon Jul 16 22:57:42 2012 >> >> Lines in torrc beginning with "Socks" are as follows. >> >> SocksPort 9050 IsolateDestAddr # what port to open for local application connections >> SocksListenAddress 127.0.0.1 # accept connections only from localhost >> SocksPolicy accept 127.0.0.1:* >> SocksPolicy accept 192.168.0.0/16:* >> SocksPolicy reject *:* >> > >The problem with that is nothing about the SocksPort: it's about the >SocksListenAddress. You can't use SocksListenAddress with the new >SocksPort format. Instead you would need to say: > >SocksPort 127.0.0.1:9050 IsolateDestAddr > Okay. Thanks for that. However, the message probably ought to be changed to avoid confusion. After all, I did have only one port specified, and it (9050) was in the range of 1-65535, which the message implies was untrue. Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ********************************************************************** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * *--------------------------------------------------------------------* * "A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army." * * -- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * **********************************************************************

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