[tor-bugs] #29565 [Obfuscation/Snowflake]: Fix broker robots.txt to disallow crawling

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Sat Feb 23 08:11:17 UTC 2019


#29565: Fix broker robots.txt to disallow crawling
---------------------------------------+--------------------
     Reporter:  dcf                    |      Owner:  (none)
         Type:  defect                 |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium                 |  Milestone:
    Component:  Obfuscation/Snowflake  |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal                 |   Keywords:  easy
Actual Points:                         |  Parent ID:
       Points:                         |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                         |
---------------------------------------+--------------------
 From comment:11:ticket:28848 and https://github.com/ahf/snowflake-
 notes/blob/fb4304a7df08c6ddeeb103f38fc9103721a20cd9/Broker.markdown#the-
 robotstxt-handler:

 > - Was the question about crawling ever answered? I can't think of a very
 good reason not to allow it. Even if censors were crawling the web for
 Snowflake brokers, they could get this information much more easily just
 from the source code.

 I believe the intention behind the robots.txt handler is to prevent search
 engines from indexing any pages on the site, because there's no permanent
 information there, not for any security or anti-enumeration reason.

 ahf points out that the current robots.txt achieves the opposite: it
 allows crawling of all pages by anyone. Instead of
 {{{
 User-agent: *
 Disallow:
 }}}
 it should be
 {{{
 User-agent: *
 Disallow: /
 }}}

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29565>
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