On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 08:17:00 -0700 Seth list@sysfu.com wrote:
On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 04:27:50 -0700, Toralf Förster toralf.foerster@gmx.de wrote:
Reading "[tor-relays] unflagged BAD EXIT nodes" /me wonders, such a feature would makes sense.
Maybe. The fundamental problems here are:
* This reduces users anonymity, in that any modifications to the path selection behavior will make a given user behave differently from others, thus reducing their anonymity set from "all Tor users" to "all Tor users that happen to use an identical configuration". The more restrictive a given user chooses to be about what Exits they allow, the more severe the reduction.
* The maintainer of such a list can do a lot of damage (partitioning attacks, serving unique lists to each people). The extreme example would be along the lines of serving out lists that BadExit everything but adversary controlled Exits, or adversary observable exits.
* How does one establish list-maintainer trust. While the methodology of the research that went into this appears solid, and the person appears to have the userbase's best interests in mind, it's hard to replicate.
At a more basic level, I personally would rather see things like the badonions honeypot code integrated into something like phw's exitmap (patches accepted), and the BadExit-ing procedure improved substantially. Both of these things would be good places for volunteers to step up, and I think would be more fruitful in the long run.
Technically this could yield to a ./torrc.d config directory, where tor users could store the (regular updated) list/s they do trusts.
That would be nice, right now copying in the fingerprints of dozens of exit nodes into torrc is downright painful, especially since they can't be listed on their own lines.
The ability to use nginx style include statements in torrc would also be helpful, that way values like 'ExitNodes' could be maintained in a separate file.
You can kind of do this with a `--defaults-torrc` file and a separate file (probably autogenerated) containing all your other things. Or start Tor with `DisableNetwork` set, and use the control port to load your tinfoil hattery.
Regards,