[network-health] New attack on the dir auths (Jan 27)

[Roger Dingledine]

Hi folks,

This afternoon a new traffic overload appeared, and this one looks
definitely intentional. Somebody is trying to harm the Tor network.
Maybe they're doing it to impact v3 onion services (because of the other
bug, which is fixed but not everybody has the update) or maybe they're
just trying to be jerks.

We've missed several consensuses recently, and we should expect to miss
more. I'm running a branch on moria1 that I think will work as a stopgap,
but a majority of the dir auth operators are happily asleep right now, so
on the theory that things won't burn down in the next hours, I'm going to
let them finish sleeping and they can apply the patch on their Thursday.
So expect things to remain uncomfortable for some hours yet.

The fix as we currently imagine it will involve exit relays applying a
patch too -- or if they can't patch easily, upgrading to a new upcoming
version of Tor that has a fix in it.

--Roger