Open Proxy Monitors

Thomas Sjögren thomas at northernsecurity.net
Wed Sep 1 20:48:14 UTC 2004


On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 12:56:16PM -0700, Hee So wrote:
> On some IRC channels, being anonymous via an open proxy will
> cause "you" to get banned. 

Yes, some freenode servers has already started doing this.

> Since Tor is in large part a
> SOCKS proxy, I could envision someone to extend the existing
> open proxy monitors to search for ORs (or more simply download
> the list of routers from the directory server) and ban those.

Will probably happen is people start using Tor as a way to flood channels 
or just making the work of channel operators work so  much harder.

> Once that happens, does this mean Tor will no longer be useable
> to IRC? and more generally, to any other target that bans the
> use of open proxies?  I don't see anything in the design that
> would prevent this from happening.
 
I'm no expert about IRC so correct me if i'm wrong, but the problem with 
IRC for example is that it bans hosts. This is of course easily bypassed
with the help of Tor and there is not much to do about it (from a IRC
server admin pov) besides banning the exit nodes.

SILC [1] is using a more sensible approach in my opinion, the Client ID, 
nickname, username, host name and/or public key may be used to ban
someone.  

[1] www.silcnet.org

/Thomas
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