[tor-relays] BWauth no-consensus state in effect

[starlight.2015q2 at binnacle.cx]

Much of Tor traffic is from long-term
circuits moving bulk data, so apparently
it will take many hours or even days
for rebalancing to fully take effect.
Is not clear whether it will cause
serious trouble or not.

My thought is that one BWauth in
a consensus is better than self-measure,
as BWauths are trusted entities and
a single rouge BWauth in some kind of
attack taking out the rest would be
dealt with via manual intervention
or the closing down of Tor.

Perhaps the self-measure cap of 10k
should be raised as well.  Was an
anti-gaming mitigation from the pre-
BWauth days and may have even preceded
the arrival of super-fast relays.


At 12:14 7/30/2015 -0500, you wrote:
>Thanks for the heads up!
>
>A fifth bwauth is expected to start voting "real
>soon now", and I'm not sure why maatuska didn't
>vote on bwauth data last vote, but I've pinged
>some folks so hopefully we can get this resolved
>quickly.
>
>-tom
>
>On 30 July 2015 at 12:04,  <starlight.2015q2 at binnacle.cx> wrote:
>> FYI list
>>
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16696
>>
>> Description
>>
>> At present both 'longclaw' and 'maatuska' have
>> dropped out of the BW consensus ('longclaw'
>> is restarting with new version, not sure
>> about 'maatuska').
>>
>> This has caused the BW consensus logic to revert
>> to using relay self-measurement for BW weightings
>> due to fewer than three BW authorities participating.
>>
>> The 10000 cap placed on self-measure values
>> is causing super-fast relays serious demotion
>> and slower relays corresponding promotion
>> in the consensus weighting.
>>
>> Possibly this may result in network
>> unbalance issues. Some adjustment
>> of the logic seems in order.
>>