[tor-relays] OR banned?

[Paul Syverson]

I have no say in how/when your relay can be reinstated. But, before
you resume any such research from any relay you should consult the Tor
Research Safety Board guidelines and then submit to them a request for
advice about the research you wish to do.
https://research.torproject.org/safetyboard.html

HTH,
Paul

On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 02:35:29PM -0300, Marcus Danilo Leite Rodrigues wrote:
> David,
> 
> My relay was harvesting .onion addresses and I apologize if that breaks any
> rule or ethical guideline.
> 
> I'm a Junior Researcher at the Laboratory of Security and Cryptography at
> University of Campinas. We were conducting some research on malicious
> Hidden Services to study their behavior and how we could design a tool that
> could tell malicious and benign Hidden Services apart.
> 
> Because we focus mainly on web pages, we use a crawler to get almost all of
> the data we need. However, there are some statistics (such as the size of
> the Tor network, how many HSs run HTTP(s) protocol, how many run other
> protocols and which protocols do they run, etc) which cannot be obtained
> through a crawler. That's why we were harvesting .onion addresses.
> 
> We would run a simple portscan and download the index page, in case it was
> running a web server, on a few random addresses we collected. We would also
> try and determine the average longevity of those few HSs. However, after
> collecting the data we needed for statistical purposes, the .onion
> addresses we collected would be deleted and under no circumstances we would
> disclose the information we collected on a specific .onion address we
> harvested. In addition, we would never target specific harvested HS, but
> only a random sample.
> 
> We would like to keep running our relay. We can make this process as
> transparent as possible without disclosing any information that would harm
> the anonymity of any user. We could also comply with any demands that the
> Tor authorities might have. In case that's not possible, we will completely
> respect your decision and will no longer harvest .onion addresses. However,
> I'd like to ask for our IP address range to be unbanned so that other
> people at my university can conduct some other research in the future and
> so we can run a regular relay :)
> 
> I appreciate the time you took to address this issue and I'm willing to
> answer any questions you may have.
> 
> Much obliged,
> Marcus.
> 
> 2017-08-24 12:16 GMT-03:00 David Goulet <dgoulet at torproject.org>:
> 
> > On 24 Aug (12:11:47), Marcus Danilo Leite Rodrigues wrote:
> > > Hello.
> > >
> > > I was running a Tor Relay for the past month (fingerprint
> > > 71BEBB61D0D35234D57087D035F12971FA315168)
> > > at my university and it seems that it got banned somehow. I got messages
> > on
> > > my log like the following:
> > >
> > > http status 400 ("Fingerprint is marked rejected -- please contact us?")
> > > response from dirserver '171.25.193.9:443'. Please correct.
> > >
> > > I was hoping to get some information regarding this ban and how I could
> > > correct whatever was done wrong in order to get my relay up and running
> > > again.
> >
> > Hello Marcus,
> >
> > You relay has been found to be harvesting .onion addresses which is
> > strictly
> > prohibited on the network.
> >
> > See https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ethical-tor-research-guidelines
> >
> > Were you conducting some research or ?
> >
> > Thanks for running a relay!
> > David
> >
> > >
> > > Best wishes,
> > > Marcus Rodrigues.
> >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > tor-relays mailing list
> > > tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
> > > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
> >
> >
> > --
> > dI6qBwjRAsZuHbMRuPaXkArKESn4fYnY9Gcn/UW8Dlc=
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > tor-relays mailing list
> > tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
> > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
> >
> >

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