[tor-relays] Recent rejection of relays

Georg Koppen gk at torproject.org
Tue Nov 9 20:09:40 UTC 2021


Hello everyone!

Some of you might have noticed that there is a visible drop of relays on 
our consensus-health website.[1] The reason for that is that we kicked 
roughly 600 non-exit relays out of the network yesterday. In fact, only 
a small fraction of them had the guard flag, so the vast majority were 
middle-only relays. We don't have any evidence that these relays were 
doing any attack, but there are attacks possible which relays could 
perform from the middle position. Therefore, we decided we'd remove 
those relays for our users' safety sake.

While we were already tracking some of the relays for a while, a big 
chunk of them was also independently reported by a cypherpunk and nusenu 
helped analyzing the data. Thanks to both of them from our side.

Foe what it is worth: a large part of those relays did not set any valid 
contact info and/or when we tried to contact some of the relays' 
operators the emails bounced. However, we sometimes need to have ways to 
reach relay operators, be it for debugging purposes or for helping them 
with relay misconfiguration. Thus, please set a valid contact info when 
running relays.

Finally, anyone running relays: try to get connected to the community so 
we can build some trust among each other. That seems to be an essential 
part in our long-term strategy to fight bad relays trying to enter our 
network.

Georg

[1] https://consensus-health.torproject.org/graphs
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