[tor-relays] Filtering TOR Non-exit Relay - Just Curious

Sun Oct 27 23:10:27 UTC 2013

I didn't say I knew the type of traffic on my relay, that would be an entirely new set of problems; I said I can see the IP addresses coming in and going out, and the ports used. I would venture to ask this is not how Tor is intended to work? If this is a possible bug in Tor, i dunno, then one could perhaps surmise that an organization with enough capital can build a network flow chart of the majority of the traffic with middle and exit nodes at their disposal?

I was curious why my firewall isn't capable of detecting ip's to and from my relay, unless I am looking at the wrong traffic logs, but yet I can see the ip's in peerblock, and this is not what i expected when reading about Tor. If Tor middle nodes are exposing ip addresses that are coming in and out of a relay, and this is not supposed to work like this by design, then oops. 

On Oct 27, 2013, at 14:23, Lukas Erlacher <l.erlacher at gmail.com> wrote:

> Middle nodes don't know the type of traffic. If they have any way to
> find out, that is a bug that needs to be fixed. End-of.
> 
> 2013/10/27 Nelson <nelson at net2wireless.net>:
>> Tor Exit Relay have the ability to filter traffic by allowing the
>> operator make choices based on personal preferences for personal, legal
>> (ex: country of origin) and for other reasons.
>> 
>> Non-exit Relays do not have the ability to set "Relay Policies"
>> (torcc??), and why would they, considering that all this traffic is
>> encrypted anyway, as I understand it, and one would not ever know what
>> type of traffic it is, or its origin, based on the bandwidth graph. I
>> checked my smoothwall firewall logs it does not seem to show the traffic
>> flowing on my relay, I guess this would be obvious because it's Tor
>> traffic; unless I'm not filtering the logs correctly.
>> 
>> Running a Tor relay seems straightforward and one could just fire-it-up
>> and easily contribute to the network. But my curiosity gets the best of me.
>> 
>> I was looking to add additional URL Filter rules for my smoothwall as a
>> more centralized way of controlling what gets to the LAN for my users.
>> While checking for additional blocklists I came upon P2P rules and I
>> started to compare the new blocklists with my old ones and then I
>> stumbled upon PeerBlock which has been around for a while.
>> 
>> On Windows 7, PeerBlock seemed to provide two things I was looking to
>> test on a TOR Relay:
>> 
>> 1. Real Time Traffic Logging (ip's and ports logged)
>> 2. The ability to filter traffic.
>> 
>> Apparently I am able to do both with PeerBlock, although I'm sure there
>> are more suitable and capable tools available out there that do this,
>> but I'm not aware of or have used any of these tools.
>> 
>> In peerblock I can create new custom lists and completely block specific
>> ip ranges (ex: warez, torrents etc.), and I am able to see what traffic
>> is allowed or blocked based on policies created.
>> 
>> 1. What problems, if any, arise from using peerblock and Tor together?
>> 2. Why do we not have the ability to at least set our own policy for the
>> type of traffic on a relay just like an Exit Relay?
>> 
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