[tor-relays] Connectivity issues; disabling my relay

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 06:32:56PM +0000, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
> So I'm bringing my Tor relay back online

Great!

>  Short bursts of packet loss like this, if someone
> was doing that deliberately with a set pattern, would have been an ideal
> way to watermark streams going in and out of the Tor network, to do some
> timing correlations.  But I'm satisfied that's not what happened here.

Actually, there's a really interesting research subfield on *undetectable*
watermarks -- that is, injecting a signal that is essentially noise
unless you know the key that generated it, and then detecting that signal
elsewhere in the network.

For papers in this area, check out

https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/#ndss09-rainbow
https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/#ndss11-swirl
https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/#pets13-flow-fingerprints

--Roger