[tor-relays] Why MyFamily?

[Moritz Bartl]

On 22.02.20 15:51, Michael Gerstacker wrote:
> I am the operator of my relays so if i for whatever reason decide to not
> publish that i run a bigger family then this should be my own decision.>
> If the torproject needs these information urgently they need to force it
> for example with a relay registration or should find a better soultion
> which is not depending on a trust level.

I am sorry, but this is an ignorant perspective. Even though the Tor
network has no means to force it on to you, you really should configure
your nodes correctly. This includes a correct MyFamily statement, even
if it means more work. If you don't want to do that work, then you
should ask yourself why you contribute relays in the first place. Do you
really want to do it to weaken the network? Probably not. It is really
not that much effort to synchronize the statement, even with a large
number of relays and without willingness to work with "configuration
management" tools. It took me only a few minutes to put together a bash
script that logs in, grabs fingerprints, assembles them to a unified
MyFamily statement, and pushes the updated line to all relays again. [1]

On a more general level, do you really want to argue than any rule or
law that is not enforceable is completely pointless in society?

You seem to think MyFamily is not that relevant because its correct
configuration relies on the same operator that you need to trust not to
perform end-to-end correlation in the first place. This is only a minor
aspect. As an operator, you and your infrastructure becomes a potential
target. By not configuring MyFamily correctly, you invite attackers, and
make their lives easier. I can pown you, steal your keys, exploit a
weakness in your configuration, get a court to give me a wiretapping
order for a single individual much easier than for many, etc etc, all
much more interesting if I _know_ that you are a careless operator that
does not configure their relays correctly. You should make your relays
less interesting, also for others, not only for yourself.

Cheers, and thanks for trying to run relays in a good fashion :)

Moritz

[1] https://github.com/torservers/myfamilyupdater