[tor-relays] [Censorship in Russia] Make HTTPS/Moat captcha more complex?

[Gary C. New]

Neel,
I get the security vs usability considerations between centralized vs decentralized (or in the case of Tor semi-decentralized) networks. However, at a minimum, doesn't it make sense to exclude publishing address information from Tor metrics, etc, as to stop giving censorship organizations a free handout? Force them to invest resources to setup distributed Tor relays to glean addresses asynchronously in the wild. As it stands, all they have to do is write a simple bot to extract the synchronously published data on a daily basis.
It seems to be an inherent obstacle in design attempting to anonymize a sub-network within an established known super-network.
Thank you for your response.
Respectfully,

Gary—
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    On Thursday, December 23, 2021, 10:14:05 PM PST, Neel Chauhan <neel at neelc.org> wrote:  
 
 On 2021-12-22 22:42, Gary C. New via tor-relays wrote:
> I know it might be a fundamental change to the Tor network, but would
> it be possible to obfuscate the Tor bridge/relay addresses with their
> respective fingerprints; similar, to the I2P network? I've often
> thought that this aspect of the I2P network is one that is implemented
> well. Perhaps Directory Authorities could preform fingerprint to
> address resolution? I think it would be extremely beneficial if
> neither bridge or relay addresses were published in the wild. It would
> make great strides in further buffering the Tor network from various
> black-listing/censorship techniques.

The thing is, while Tor itself is decentralized, the directory 
authorities and fallback directories are not.

For a Tor client to bootstrap, you need a list of relays to be able to 
connect to. And in turn you have to contact the dirauths or the 
fallbacks.

While you could use an I2P-style or more recently blockchain-style 
setup, I believe there was a reason for Tor to use centralized dirauths.

I can't seem to find the article/FAQ right now, even though I had it a 
few years ago. I'm guessing it's to prevent malicious dirauths, unlike 
how Bitcoin could get manipulated by bad actors with a decentralized 
authority system.

> Respectfully,
> 
> Gary

-Neel
  
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