[tor-talk] What happen if one create 2000 exit nodes for 6 hours?

Damian Johnson atagar1 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 21 15:14:35 UTC 2011


Hi Fabio. What you're describing is a sybil attack. An attacker
definitely *wouldn't* get a majority of the exit traffic for those
destinations - clients weigh relay selection by heuristics reported by
the bandwidth authorities. Those authorities take a long time to warm
up to new relays, so it would take quite a bit of uptime before they'd
start seeing a substantial chunk of traffic.

Also, we'd get an alarm and cut them out of the consensus, for an example see...
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/badRelays#trotsky

short summary: 747 exits suddenly appeared and were dropped from the consensus

That said, smaller and slower sybil adversaries could go undetected so
if you see something fishy then let us know! -Damian


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