List,
I'm starting this thread in relation to the following discussion:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/107490/how-will-france-block-to...
I definitely don't have a perfect knowledge of Tor, so correct me if I'm wrong at any point. I heard that Tor entry nodes right now are distributed to users as IP addresses, which are scarce resources that could be blocked.
In order to make this more difficult, pluggable transports were introduced - those try to use other protocols to define communication with Tor network, lowering the cost of introducing new way to connect with it.
One that particularly caught my attention is Meek, which uses CDNs to evade censorship. CDNs share same IPs for many critical Internet serices, so blocking them is not an option and having them behind TLS makes it even more complicated.
The problem I noticed though is that the costs of Meek go up and if I read the reports from David Fifield (the maintainer of Meek), the bandwidth has to be limited to avoid abuse. This slows the transport down and I thought of another approach.
Instead of using a limited amount of Meek nodes, we could encourage users to run those on their own and distribute them in a way similar to regular Tor entry nodes. The catch would be that those nodes would require a small Bitcoin pre-payment that covers the cost of bandwidth used. The node would require the user to pass some proof of payment during the connection and not respond at all if there was no payment made. Here's an example way this could work:
1. User sends a message to bridges@bridges.torproject.org with a request for a meek bridge and a GPG public key attached, 2. The bridge service replies with a Bitcoin address created just for the user, 3. As soon as the user sends any Bitcoins, it receives another e-mail with the hostname of the Meek relay and a token that one should use
Together with Amazon AWS, this could be an automated solution to the bandwidth and payment problem that would result in short-lived relays that are difficult to detect.
What do you think about it? Hopefully I didn't mess it up in the fundamentals and this could actually help any little.
Cheers, d33tah