[tor-relays] Bridge lifecycle expectations

[meskio]

Quoting Just a Pleb (2022-03-23 02:43:54)
> 1) How long is typical (or what factors are involved ) before the bridge
> address is given out to users.

It should take less than 3 hours to start being taken into account by
rdsys/bridgedb. But unless you configure a specific distributor you will be
assigned randomly to one and depending on the distributor it might have
different ways to distribute bridges or it might get into the 'reserve' which
means is a bridge reserved and not distributed (yet).

> 2) How do I know when the bridge is burned (identified and blocked)

Usually a 'burnded' bridge is a per country situation, I mean your bridge might
be burned in Russia but be still working in Iran. You can monitor how many
connections you get from each country (by looking at stats/bridgestats) and if
you were getting many connections from a certain country and they drop to 0 that
means your bridge is burned in that country.

> 3) When it is burned and I build a new one on an other address should I copy
> the key with the config to maintain "trust" continuity or is that neutral or
> bad for bridges?

No, is better to set up a new bridge. An attacker that knows the bridge
fingerprint can get access to the rest of the bridge information. I will
recommend setting up a fresh new bridge if you consider yours burned.

> As a little context I've run relays before and just started up an obfs4proxy
> Bridge (well 10days ago).

BTW, is not recommended to run exit relays and bridges by the same organization,
as the family parameter doesn't exist for bridges.

> https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=<MY_BRIDGE_ID>
>
> says it's good, logs look good but I've yet to see any real traffic, just the same 8 German node that I presume are Tor infrastructure checking status.

What distributor the metrics website say your bridge is in?
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/<fingerprint>

Your bridge might be assigned to a distributor that is not in use yet (like
settings or telegram), but will be very useful in the coming weeks.

BTW, ip counting is rounded to 8, so seeing 8 might mean you have a single
client connecting to it or up to 8.

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