[tor-relays] Meeting notes of the relay operators meeting in Valencia

[Jens Kubieziel]

Hi,

below you find my notes for the relay operators meeting we had in
Valencia. Those just some short notes. If you have any questions or
remarks, please don't hesitate.


* Introduction
Several Tor relay operators met at Tor Developer meeting in Valencia,
Spain. At our meeting we had operators from the following countries:
  - Germany
  - Netherlands
  - France
  - Spain
  - India
  - Costa Rica
This document gives a short overview what we discussed. If you have
any questions or comments don't hesitate.

* DDoS attacks:
One questions which was raised is what to do against DDoS
attacks. Several ISPs complained about DDoS attacks against Tor
relays. There were also shutdowns of servers.

It was suggested to employ DDoS mitigation tools. Other operators
suggested to don't do anything. It is better to educate the ISP about
Tor.

Do you have any experiences with this topic?

* Abuse
TorServers has templates for different cases of abuse. See
[[https://www.torservers.net/wiki/abuse/templates]]. The Tor Project
offers also some advice in their wiki. See
[[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorAbuseTemplates]]. Furthermore
several organisations developed their own templates. Someone at the
meeting offered to review others templates.

As a general advice one should start with thanking the person and
acknowledge what they do.

TODO: We should rephrase some of the templates and generate some hice,
good example documents.

* Bridges
The current alpha release of Tor Browser Bundle 4.5 comes with support
for obfs4. Currently there are only few bridges which use obfs4 and
everyone is asked to enable the new protocol.

Obfs3 doesn't really work in China and obfs4 is the current best
bet. If you have any questions about obfs4 you should have a look at
the documentation or write an email to Yawning
(<yawning at torproject.org>).

Some links:
- How to run an obfs4 bridge: https://tor.stackexchange.com/q/6370/88
- Debian package:
  https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=obfs4proxy
- Post at tor-relays: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2014-September/005372.html

* Tor relays in Japan
It is legal to run relays in Japan, but practically it depends on
ISP. So if you know a person in Japan, encourage them to run a Tor
relay.

It was said that relays from  SE asia went online for some time and
slowed down the overall network. Jens talked to Mike Perry who
couldn't remember such incident and also couldn't believe that this is
true.

* Relays in India
There are some relays in India, some of them probably in universities
and some very slow. A home connection is 60/60MB/s and capped at
8GB/80GB per month. I couldn't really understand what the correct
numbers were.

* How to make nodes faster
Someone had a 10Gig which link was not used. It was recommended to use
multiple processes; one process per core. So also hints at
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay

* Tor wheather
Several peopel work on Tor weather. The status is not clear. However
there is some need for a working version.

* ARM devices
We found out that several organisation have utilised some ARM
device. Juris from Torservers runs a Bananapi at a data center and
gets 30-40MB/s. DFRI has a router which they give away to interested
persons. Jacob Appelbaum made a combination of Relay and Router.

Merlijn suggested that Hardkernel has some faster ones which fit for
exit relays.

We want to work more closely together to create some neat device.

* Stats on exits
Someone asked if it is OK to run statistics on exit relays. As long as
the tools only monitor the amount of traffic this is OK. Looking into
exit traffic or even messing with the traffic would instantly qualify
you as a bad exit.

* Legal issues
  + Germany has no data retention law in place
  + data retention in the Netherlands: court case said illegal, try to make a law
  + France: https://netzpolitik.org/2015/franzoesischer-patriot-act-ueberwachungsmassnahmen/ (yes, data retention since 2011)
  + article 12 of ecommerce directive
  + Costa Rica has no data retention law

* World Hosting Days
  + Who is interested to go there?

* TODO
  - Work on templates
  - How many DMCA notices do you get? Can you give Jens some monthly
    numbers together with the exit probability of your relays? An EFF
    person wanted to collect some numbers. Jens will relay those
    numbers.
  - run obfs4 bridges

-- 
Jens Kubieziel                                   http://www.kubieziel.de
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