On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 07:10:43AM -0300, Vitor Milagres wrote:
I see the Authority Nodes are located only in North America and Europe. I would like to contribute to the TOR network as much as possible. I am currently running a node and I would like to make it an Authority Node as well. I am from Brazil and I believe it would possibly be a good idea to have a new Authority Node in South America. What are the requirements? What should I do to become one of them? FYI, the node I am running is 79DFB0E1D79D1306AF03A4B094C55A576989ABD1
Thanks for your interest in running a directory authority! Long ago we wrote up a set of goals for new directory authorities: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/attic/authority-policy.txt
It is definitely an informal policy at this point, but it still gets across some of the requirements.
If you're able to run an exit relay at your location, that's definitely more useful than another directory authority at this point.
Also, because we haven't automated some steps, each new directory authority that we add means additional coordination complexity, especially when we identify misbehaving relays and need to bump them out of the network quickly.
Here are two big changes since that document:
(1) The directory authorities periodically find themselves needing to scale to quite large bandwidths -- sustaining 200mbit at a minimum, and being able to burst to 400mbit or 500mbit, is pretty much needed at this point: https://bugs.torproject.org/33018
(2) Tor ships with hundreds of hard-coded relays called Fallback Directories, which distribute the load for bootstrapping into the Tor network, and which also provide alternate access points if the main directory authorities are blocked. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors So while the directory authorities are still a trust bottleneck, they are less of a performance bottleneck than they used to be.
In summary: if you want to run a directory authority, your next step is to join the Tor community, get to know us and get us to know you, come to one of the dev meetings (once the world is able to travel again), and see where things go from there.
Thanks, --Roger