Hello Tor Relay Operators! Hope you all got home from congress, made it well into 2026, and are ready for whatever craziness this year may bring. As usual, we had a well-visited relay operator meetup during the 39th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, last week. Big thanks to Leibi for getting this setup! Unfortunately, I didn't take notes during the event, but I am going to add a dump of my memory here for the community to see. Leibi welcomed the participants when we arrived, and mentioned that we only had the room for an hour. We found out that four groups had smaller presentations they wanted to share with the community. Alex (me) started by giving an update from Tor's Network Team on 2025 and 2026. The slides from this presentation are available at https://ahf.me/talks/2025/12/30/tor-relay-operators-meetup/ and they were deliberately designed with lots of text, so people should be able to understand them without a recording or summary. As part of the presentation, I mentioned that we would be doing more "Community Days" events in 2026, and that there will be more information about the next one in Denmark in the next couple of days. Alex (not me) and Christopher (I think that was the name, but please correct me if I am wrong here) from Emerald Onion gave a presentation on their vision for evolving their Tor Relay security architecture. The focus here was on a more stateless architecture, where we can eventually perform remote attestation of the relays and protect individual relays using new features in AMD's SEV-SNP feature set for virtual machine integrity and isolation. There were no slides; instead, they went over the blog post they published at https://blog.emeraldonion.org/evolving-our-tor-relay-security-architecture which I recommend to everybody excited about building even safer ways to run Tor relays at scale. At the end of the presentation, they mentioned that buying new CPUs for experimentation was expensive and that they were seeking funding. Their donation page can be found at https://emeraldonion.org/donate/ The Foundation for Applied Privacy presented their annual report on how their setup is going and what happened in 2025. As part of this, they mentioned their interesting Mastodon post (which did indeed become my favorite social media post of 2025) about receiving offers to sell their Tor exit capacity to an adversary, and they shared their reflections on the situation. You can find their Mastodon post at https://mastodon.social/@applied_privacy/115612416188501042. I didn't catch a link to their presentation, but maybe they can add it as a reply to this email. You can also donate to these folks at https://applied-privacy.net/donate/ Finally, there was a presentation from someone whose name I did not catch, who used the same tooling that the Foundation of Applied Privacy has been building over the last few years. Please link to your presentation if possible to this thread :-) We had a few minutes for Q&A, and I remember three questions from this period: 1. One cypherpunk mentioned they were making custom postcards that relay operator communities could sell during the Chaos events to raise funds. 2. One cypherpunk asked about a potential bug where the key pinning the directory authorities does to enforce that RSA and the ed25519 identity keys of the relays mustn't individually rotate during the lifetime of a relay, but they had a situation where this had enforcement had failed at first, but when they wanted to switch back to the old tuple of keys, the directory authorities refused this. Alex (me) had no good answers to this, but it sounds like the person asking the question was in contact with Roger about this. Do we have a ticket for this? It sounds like a bug to me. 3. A couple of cypherpunks were eager to start using Tor 0.4.9.x due to the arrival of Happy Families. Alex is going to talk with David Goulet (the maintainer of C Tor) about when we think we can get this out on our stable channel and get back to people with an update once he has more information. Alex also mentioned that we probably want to do a relatively quick upgrade cycle for this, particularly for the large relay families, as we are going to make the life for Tor users on Apple's iOS platforms more miserable before it hopefully gets better, and we can retire the classic family system. At the very end, during the chaos of us having to leave the room and the next crowd arrival, Kantorkel mentioned that if groups are looking for funding to run relays or build better relay infrastructure, they can reach out to him, and the CCC may be able to help! Afterwards, we all left the room, but people continued talking for a bit as part of the usual hallway track. People who participated and have more context, please add it to this thread. The folks who presented can link to their slides if they wish to! Thanks to everybody who participated, and again, to Leibi for getting us a conference room during the event! The following European events that will have Tor people attending are FOSDEM, BornHack, and 40C3. Cheers, Alex -- Alexander Hansen Færøy