Hello everyone,
I'm a member of Lysator ACS at Linköping university, Sweden. I'm currently investigating the possibility for our computer society to run Tor exit nodes. The IT department has made it clear that they will need some convincing that this is a good idea. One thing that they are wondering is whether there are other universites with experience running Tor nodes.
If anyone is currently running Tor nodes on university networks, I'd love to hear about your experiences. A few questions that turned up are listed below.
- Have you seen any good or bad press because of the node? - Are you receiving a lot of abuse complaints? - How are you handling abuse complaints? - How are you protecting the rest of your infrastructure from possibly malicious traffic? - Do you have any killer arguments as to why supporting Tor is a good idea that helped sway the people in charge at your university?
Thank you in advance for any feedback! Cordially, Andreas Kempe
Hi Andreas,
There is a mailing list for tor & universities: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays-universities/ its not very high traffic and the archives do not hold many e-mails.
It's maybe worth to ask there too and to read through the archives.
I'd also suggest to check for EDU relays on relay search and contact some of the bigger EDU relays directly. It would probably be good to have some catalog of questions ready.
Edu AS that I remember to run tor exit relays:
- AS3 (MIT, US) - AS680 (DFN, DE) - AS12093 (UWaterloo, CA) - AS36850 (UNC, US)
There are probably dozens more. So I'd suggest to browse through relay search yourself :-)
Best regards, Matthias
On 07.06.21 19:00, Andreas Kempe wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm a member of Lysator ACS at Linköping university, Sweden. I'm currently investigating the possibility for our computer society to run Tor exit nodes. The IT department has made it clear that they will need some convincing that this is a good idea. One thing that they are wondering is whether there are other universites with experience running Tor nodes.
If anyone is currently running Tor nodes on university networks, I'd love to hear about your experiences. A few questions that turned up are listed below.
- Have you seen any good or bad press because of the node?
- Are you receiving a lot of abuse complaints?
- How are you handling abuse complaints?
- How are you protecting the rest of your infrastructure from possibly malicious traffic?
- Do you have any killer arguments as to why supporting Tor is a good idea that helped sway the people in charge at your university?
Thank you in advance for any feedback! Cordially, Andreas Kempe
tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Hi,
That's awesome, Andreas!
We have this page with some tips: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-relay-univers...
Here's a project that other members of our community have used in the past and that you could adapt for your university: https://www.overleaf.com/project/541e42eddb749944790bd16d
And as Matthias said, you can find more relays outside .EDU, for example, this non-exit node hosted by our friends in University of Campinas, in Brazil: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/1E7BDE03151AAB779CB4AFEAEEA52...
Regarding your specific questions, we can chat on #tor-relays / irc.oftc.net[1] (or #tor-relays:matrix.org, if you use matrix).
cheers, Gus
[1] https://support.torproject.org/get-in-touch/
On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 09:26:28AM +0200, Matthias Fetzer wrote:
Hi Andreas,
There is a mailing list for tor & universities: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays-universities/ its not very high traffic and the archives do not hold many e-mails.
It's maybe worth to ask there too and to read through the archives.
I'd also suggest to check for EDU relays on relay search and contact some of the bigger EDU relays directly. It would probably be good to have some catalog of questions ready.
Edu AS that I remember to run tor exit relays:
- AS3 (MIT, US)
- AS680 (DFN, DE)
- AS12093 (UWaterloo, CA)
- AS36850 (UNC, US)
There are probably dozens more. So I'd suggest to browse through relay search yourself :-)
Best regards, Matthias
On 07.06.21 19:00, Andreas Kempe wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm a member of Lysator ACS at Linköping university, Sweden. I'm currently investigating the possibility for our computer society to run Tor exit nodes. The IT department has made it clear that they will need some convincing that this is a good idea. One thing that they are wondering is whether there are other universites with experience running Tor nodes.
If anyone is currently running Tor nodes on university networks, I'd love to hear about your experiences. A few questions that turned up are listed below.
- Have you seen any good or bad press because of the node?
- Are you receiving a lot of abuse complaints?
- How are you handling abuse complaints?
- How are you protecting the rest of your infrastructure from possibly malicious traffic?
- Do you have any killer arguments as to why supporting Tor is a good idea that helped sway the people in charge at your university?
Thank you in advance for any feedback! Cordially, Andreas Kempe
tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 09:26:28AM +0200, Matthias Fetzer wrote:
Hi Andreas,
Hello Matthias,
There is a mailing list for tor & universities: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays-universities/ its not very high traffic and the archives do not hold many e-mails.
It's maybe worth to ask there too and to read through the archives.
We have looked at the archives and the one mail that was fairly recent and relevant was https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays-universities/2020-December... which only got one SPAM reply. We decided it would be better if I post on this list instead.
I'd also suggest to check for EDU relays on relay search and contact some of the bigger EDU relays directly. It would probably be good to have some catalog of questions ready.
Edu AS that I remember to run tor exit relays:
- AS3 (MIT, US)
- AS680 (DFN, DE)
- AS12093 (UWaterloo, CA)
- AS36850 (UNC, US)
There are probably dozens more. So I'd suggest to browse through relay search yourself :-)
Thank you for the concrete suggestion regarding relevant AS numbers to look at. We were keeping direct contact as plan B if we wouldn't receive any replies on the list.
On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 05:06:43PM -0300, gus wrote:
Hi,
Hello,
That's awesome, Andreas!
We have this page with some tips: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-relay-univers...
I read through the page before mailing the list and I especially appreciate the template letter from EFF. I am hoping that a system of standardised response e-mails can be realised to lessen the burden of handling complaints. Maybe with some degree of automation?
Here's a project that other members of our community have used in the past and that you could adapt for your university: https://www.overleaf.com/project/541e42eddb749944790bd16d
And as Matthias said, you can find more relays outside .EDU, for example, this non-exit node hosted by our friends in University of Campinas, in Brazil: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/1E7BDE03151AAB779CB4AFEAEEA52...
I don't think running a non-exit node would be an issue since they won't generate nearly as much abuse. I have considered looking at running normal nodes or possibly bridges if we hit a wall regarding exit nodes.
Regarding your specific questions, we can chat on #tor-relays / irc.oftc.net[1] (or #tor-relays:matrix.org, if you use matrix).
I'm present on oftc and will get in touch.
Thank you both for your answers! Cordially, Andreas Kempe
Hey.
Am 6/9/21 um 9:51 PM schrieb Andreas Kempe:
We have this page with some tips: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-relay-univers...
I read through the page before mailing the list and I especially appreciate the template letter from EFF. I am hoping that a system of standardised response e-mails can be realised to lessen the burden of handling complaints. Maybe with some degree of automation?
That is totally possible. At Artikel10 (https://artikel10.org/), we use Zammad to realize some degree of automation. We ignore some mails, some receive our standard reply.
Here's a project that other members of our community have used in the past and that you could adapt for your university: https://www.overleaf.com/project/541e42eddb749944790bd16d
And as Matthias said, you can find more relays outside .EDU, for example, this non-exit node hosted by our friends in University of Campinas, in Brazil: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/1E7BDE03151AAB779CB4AFEAEEA52...
Here you find our experiences from running Tor exits at two German universities: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04277
I don't think running a non-exit node would be an issue since they won't generate nearly as much abuse. I have considered looking at running normal nodes or possibly bridges if we hit a wall regarding exit nodes.
(My relay at university is a low-bandwidth relay but...) If abuse is an issue, you could allow fewer ports or even ports 80, 443 only. In the past months, most abuse mails that I received were about port 22.
Best, kantorkel
On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 10:23:54PM +0200, kantorkel@hamburg.freifunk.net wrote:
Hey.
Hello,
Am 6/9/21 um 9:51 PM schrieb Andreas Kempe:
We have this page with some tips: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/tor-relay-univers...
I read through the page before mailing the list and I especially appreciate the template letter from EFF. I am hoping that a system of standardised response e-mails can be realised to lessen the burden of handling complaints. Maybe with some degree of automation?
That is totally possible. At Artikel10 (https://artikel10.org/), we use Zammad to realize some degree of automation. We ignore some mails, some receive our standard reply.
Thank you for the suggestion. We'll have a look.
Here's a project that other members of our community have used in the past and that you could adapt for your university: https://www.overleaf.com/project/541e42eddb749944790bd16d
And as Matthias said, you can find more relays outside .EDU, for example, this non-exit node hosted by our friends in University of Campinas, in Brazil: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/1E7BDE03151AAB779CB4AFEAEEA52...
Here you find our experiences from running Tor exits at two German universities: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04277
I got this shared off-list and was asked to not spread it since it wasn't yet uploaded to arxiv. Good to see that it is now made public. Having a fresh example like this is great!
I don't think running a non-exit node would be an issue since they won't generate nearly as much abuse. I have considered looking at running normal nodes or possibly bridges if we hit a wall regarding exit nodes.
(My relay at university is a low-bandwidth relay but...) If abuse is an issue, you could allow fewer ports or even ports 80, 443 only. In the past months, most abuse mails that I received were about port 22.
Yes, we were planning to run with a reduced exit policy and I'm pretty sure that the IT department will have opinions about it as well if we get to run a relay.
Cordially, Andreas Kempe
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
-
Andreas Kempe -
gus -
kantorkel＠hamburg.freifunk.net -
Matthias Fetzer