Dear all,

below mail was meant to make it to tor-dev, but I got a bounce and didn't notice until now. Whoops, my apologies.

On 8. Dec 2016, at 14:29, Sebastian Hahn tor@sebastianhahn.net wrote:

Hi,

...

On 08 Dec 2016, at 14:03, nusenu nusenu@openmailbox.org wrote:

Dear tor directory authorities,

TLDR: Would you blacklist relays with end-to-end correlation capabilities?

I'm asking to find out whether it makes sense to put any effort into finding such operators [2]. If most dir auths would not blacklist such relays than it does not make sense to look for them I guess.

So please let us know whats your opinion on that - thank you.

More information below and there [1]:

The process could look something like this:

• someone identifies such a relay groups (basically based on contactinfo

[2])

• contact the operators asking to fix this (ideally this would be a

@torproject.org sender)

• give them 15 days to fix it
• if not fixed: blacklist respective guard relays
• give them the possibility to get removed from the blacklist once fixed

I do not think that this is worthwhile. It establishes a precedent where setting your contact info is something that gets you banned, potentially incorrectly because it's unauthenticated, whereas we're unable to identify people who actually maliciously run several relays without such indicators.

Additionally, it's yet one more thing to update the dirauths' configs for, but with rather more overhead as we might get multiple mails back and forth about how MyFamily is annoying to maintain, how they're just trying to help, etc. All not so bad arguments.

If we did this, also why would we blacklist the nonexit relays? That seems to not make sense, as a relay operator could have multiple relays that act as guard and exit simultaneously. I think we'd need to blacklist at least all the exit relays, if not all of them. BadExiting them would then be the more sensible choice. Scarcity of resources has in the past led us to bad designs like Valid/Invalid relays etc, which causes way more annoyances than good things.

Cheers Sebastian

Cheers Sebastian