[tor-bugs] #16861 [Tor]: Pad Tor connections to collapse netflow records

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#16861: Pad Tor connections to collapse netflow records
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     Reporter:  mikeperry    |      Owner:  mikeperry
         Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  needs_review
     Priority:  normal       |  Milestone:
    Component:  Tor          |    Version:
   Resolution:               |   Keywords:
Actual Points:               |  Parent ID:
       Points:               |
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Comment (by mikeperry):

 Roger - I'm in complete agreement with your statements, save for
 hesitation on moving quickly. This is a narrow case where it's really easy
 to do what we want from a technical POV. So long as we ensure that this
 patch is doing what we intend (which is just to send at least one cell on
 a connection every 15s), then I think getting this patch out there faster
 will move everything you said forward quicker - mobilizing the research
 community, making people excited to run more fast guard nodes, etc. And if
 we find out it isn't doing what we intend, or causing too much load, we
 turn it off from the consensus. Release early, release often! Move fast
 and break stuff (yeah I just said that). Etc etc.

 Some third-rate researchers will be sure to deliberately misinterpret this
 defense so they can get a cheap publication, but I also suspect that some
 good researchers will tell us what else we could do against the more
 complicated, higher-resolution cases than default-configuration netflow
 records.

 I also believe that future defenses will be completely orthogonal to the
 netflow defense code and can be completely ignorant of it in their
 implementation and still remain optimal, since if they decide to send
 padding for any reason, then the netflow defense won't (since the netflow
 defense only sends padding if the connection is idle).

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16861#comment:8>
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