[tor-relays] Recent rejection of relays

[Georg Koppen]

Tor Relays:
> Georg Koppen <gk at torproject.org>:
> 
>> 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
>>
> 
> When you don't have any evidence that these relays were doing something bad
> then what did they do to get rejected?

I am afraid I can't give you any details. The best I can do to be able 
to keep up in the ongoing arms race is pointing you to our wiki page 
talking about the criteria for rejecting relays[1].

Georg

[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/wikis/Criteria-for-rejecting-bad-relays
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