[tor-relays] Giving away some "pre-warmed" relay keys for adoption

Yawning Angel yawning at schwanenlied.me
Wed Jul 29 13:32:06 UTC 2015


On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 18:03:31 +0500
Roman Mamedov <rm at romanrm.net> wrote:
> I have decided to spin up some more servers, and this should postpone
> the need to turn off any of the relays by at least 3 weeks (at the
> cost of an increased burn-rate, i.e. now they all will expire sooner
> and "all at once").

Ok.  Have you thought about contacting other people that organize
hosting (at the expense of further reducing relay operator diversity, I
would suggest the Tor Servers people).  If additional relay bandwidth
is added now, the hope is that they will get through the measurement
delay by the time you do need to decommission your servers.

> Also the reaction on the mailing list was not overly positive, so I
> might reconsider the idea of letting others reuse these identities
> altogether.

So, first of all, I'd like to apologize for being overly harsh, since
I'm fairly sure you had good intentions in mind when offering your
relay ID keys.

Like I noted in my reply to Paul S. if there was a way to
measure/quantify trust, or deal with the "people's Guards just
potentially switched location, and definitely switched operator" side
of this equation I would be a lot more open to this sort of thing.

But like the oft complained about bwauth stuff, these are unsolved
problems.  Each user/HS's Guard node is in a unique position to do extra
nasty things to anonymity, so the threshold of trust for handing over
control of Guard nodes for a large number of users is going to be
rather high (Near insurmountable for the amount of bandwidth you are
contributing).

The one upshot of all this is that people are now thinking about the
implication of a Guard moving, which hopefully will lead to a safer Tor
for the userbase in the future.

Regards,

-- 
Yawning Angel
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