tor-relays December 2012

tor-relays@lists.torproject.org

14 participants
6 discussions

Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Roger Dingledine 09 Jan '13

09 Jan '13

For a few years now, funders have been asking if they can pay Tor to run more relays. I kept telling them their money was better spent on code and design improvements: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/why-tor-is-slow https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/roadmaps/Tor/Performance since a) network load would just grow to fill whatever new capacity we have, especially if we don't deal with the tiny fraction of users who do bulk downloads, and b) reducing diversity of relay operator control can harm anonymity. But lately the Tor network has become noticeably faster, and I think it has a lot to do with the growing amount of excess relay capacity relative to network load: https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html?graph=bandwidth&start=2010-06-0… At the same time, much of our performance improvement comes from better load balancing -- that is, concentrating traffic on the relays that can handle it better. The result though is a direct tradeoff with relay diversity: on today's network, clients choose one of the fastest 5 exit relays around 25-30% of the time, and 80% of their choices come from a pool of 40-50 relays. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6443 Since extra capacity is clearly good for performance, and since we're not doing particularly well at diversity with the current approach, we're going to try an experiment: we'll connect funding to exit relay operators so they can run bigger and/or better exit relays. If we do it right (make more faster exit relays that aren't the current biggest ones, so there are more to choose from), we will improve the network's diversity as well as being able to handle more users. We've lined up our first funder (BBG, aka http://www.voanews.com/), and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can. They want to sponsor 125+ fast exits. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Open questions we need to decide about: 1) What exactly would we pay for? I think the right way to do it is to offer to reimburse bandwidth/hosting costs -- I don't want to get into the business of paying people to run relays, and I don't want people to be trying to figure out how to "profit". That leads to all sorts of horrible incentive structures. More broadly, we should keep in mind that the primary cost of running an exit relay is effort, not dollars: it takes dedication to find an ISP who will host it, and to hold that ISP's hand when an abuse complaint arrives. Or said another way, hosting costs are in many cases not the biggest barrier to running an exit relay. I think we should aim to constrain ourselves to talking about >=100mbit exits, assuming that turns out to give us enough choices. That said, we don't want to concentrate bandwidth too much in any given relay, so we should limit the amount we'll reimburse per relay. 2) Should we fund existing relays or new ones? The worst failure mode here would be that we screw up the current community of relay operators. That's why it's extra important to keep them involved at each step of this discussion. I think the right answer is probably a balance of reimbursing costs from current exits and encouraging new exits to appear. Before we can get more precise though, we need to get a handle on how many current fast exits there are, and what their constraints are (whether their hosting situation could give them more bandwidth, whether they're paying now or getting a deal through a friend/employer, etc). Even then, there are interesting further questions like: - Should we prefer big collectives like torservers, noisetor, CCC, dfri.se, and riseup (which can get great bulk rates on bandwidth and are big enough to have relationships with local lawyers and ISPs), or should we prefer individuals since they maximize our operator diversity? I think "explore both approaches" is a fine first plan. - For existing relays who pay for hosting, should we prefer that our money go to covering their existing costs (and then we encourage them to save their money for use, say, after this experiment finishes), or should we aim to add additional funding so the relay can use more bandwidth? I'd say it comes down to the preferences of the relay operator. That said, if we have plenty to choose from, we should pick the relays that will make the network grow -- but we should take extra care to avoid situations where operators in the first category say "well, fine" and shut down their relay. More generally, we need to consider sustainability. Our current exit relay funding is for a period of 12 months, and while there's reason to think we will find continued support, the Tor network must not end up addicted to external funding. So long as everybody is running an exit relay because they want to save the world, I think we should be fine. 4) What exactly do we mean by diversity? There's network diversity (AS / upstream network topology), organization and operator diversity, jurisdictional (country) diversity, funding diversity, data-center diversity, and more. We've started to answer some of these questions at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6232 https://blog.torproject.org/blog/research-problem-measuring-safety-tor-netw… but this research topic will need ongoing attention. I'd love to get to the point where our diversity metrics can recommend network locations that best improve the various diversity scores. 5) How much "should" an exit relay cost? Since we're aiming for diversity, we can't send all our volunteers to the same cut-rate German VPS provider. After all, much of the work in setting up an exit relay is finding a good provider that doesn't already host a bunch of Tor relays. But if we declare that we'll reimburse $50/month for 100mbit, we're going to attract a different set of volunteers -- and a different set of network locations -- than if we reimburse $100/month for 100mbit. We need to learn about current bandwidth pricing: I know there are 10 cheap hosting places that will tolerate exit relays, but are there 200? And do all of those 200 turn out to overlap diversity-wise? Initial guesses appreciated. I'm inclined toward the $100 number to give our volunteers more flexibility. If we want to reimburse on a monthly basis, how do we handle situations where the ISP wants a longer-term contract? I think the answer will come down to how many choices we have. 6) How exactly should we choose which exit relay operators to reimburse? It might be premature to speculate until we better understand what choices are available to us. But I think the answer must include doing it in a way that encourages continued growth of the relay operator _community_. People who are active in the Tor community, and well-known to many other people, should be part of the answer. At the same time, we should be willing to put some of the money into trying out new places and people, especially if they're in good locations diversity-wise. The broader answer is that we as a community need to figure out a good answer here. I definitely don't want it to be "Roger picks people in an opaque way". But I also don't want the answer to be "anybody on the Internet who offers to take our money". Maybe we should put together a consortium of current Tor activists who run fast exits? 7) How do we audit / track the sponsored relays? How should we check that your 100mbit relay is really working? What do we measure to confirm its capacity? To a first approximation I'm fine assuming that nobody is going to try to cheat (say, by colluding with an ISP to write legit-looking invoices but then just split the money). But as the plan scales, we need good ways to track statistics on how many relays are being sponsored and how much bandwidth they're providing (so funders can see how effective their money is), and what fraction of the overall network these sponsored relays are (to keep an eye on the diversity questions). 8) Legal questions? Tor exit relays raise plenty of legal questions already, especially when you consider jurisdiction variety. But reimbursing relays introduces even more excitement, such as: - Does such a relay operator end up in a different situation legally? - Does the overall Tor network change legal categories in some country, e.g. becoming a telecommunications service when it wasn't before? - Does The Tor Project Inc incur new liabilities for offering this money? Tor has a history of creating fascinating new challenges for legal scholars, and this exit relay funding experiment will be no exception. I believe if we position it correctly, we won't really change the legal context. But I encourage people to investigate these questions for their jurisdiction. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Next steps: I'm going to do a short blog post pointing to this thread, since many interested parties aren't on tor-relays yet. Then I'll send individual emails to exit relay operators pointing them to it and asking for their feedback (on the list or private, whichever they prefer). I'll also try to get some sense of how much their hosting costs, whether they'd want to participate in our experiment, whether they're in a position to ramp up to a faster connection, etc. Once we have some concrete facts about how many current exit relays want to participate, how many new volunteers want to help, and how many ISPs could handle more exit relays and at what prices, we'll be in a better position to decide how to proceed. --Roger

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DDOS?
by mick 31 Dec '12

31 Dec '12

Hi guys The provider for one of my VPSs, running my tor node tor.baldric.net has shut it down (unilaterally and without telling me) a couple of times this month, most recently today. Their response to my query as to why is that they say they are seeing a large DDOS attack on the VPS server hosting my node, apparently aimed at my address. I shut tor down while I investigated and when running nethogs I noticed a shed load of attempted connections to my tor port (443) from non-tor addresses. A snapshot is at http://rlogin.net/tor/incoming.png Anyone else seeing anything similar? I can't believe I'm the only node being poked. Cheers Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- blog: baldric.net gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Complaint about spam originating from my server
by Brock Tice 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Hello all, I follow the guide for avoiding abuse notices, and generally I only get 1/year of the DMCA variety. However, I recently received this complaint, which appears to show spam originating from my Tor server (209.188.113.101 / tor-proxy.anfani.com). As far as I know, port 25 is blocked on my exit policy. Port 587 is allowed. I do have a mail server running on this machine, but it does not accept outside connections. Is there something I am missing? Is there anything else I should do to prevent this in the future? Could there be some way that a Tor user could locally send mail using my server? Thanks, --Brock -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RES: Fwd: Olá Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:41:22 +0000 (UTC) From: abuse(a)terra.com.br To: Luis Barzon <barzon(a)terra.com.br> CC: network-abuse(a)cc.yahoo-inc.com, brock(a)anfani.com Prezado Usuário, O Departamento de Abuse do Terra trabalha seriamente para proteger seus assinantes contra abusos cometidos por terceiros. Nosso objetivo é proporcionar segurança aos nossos Clientes, evitando e impedindo o mau uso da Internet, através dos servidores Terra. Em relação a sua reclamação, informamos que após análise, identificamos que o responsável não pertence ao Terra.Nesses casos identificamos o administrador e encaminhamos a incidência para a devida tratativa. Salientamos que as devidas ações corretivas passam a ser de responsabilidade do administrador da rede identificada. Para o seu conhecimento, o endereço de contato que encaminhamos a incidência é: network-abuse(a)cc.yahoo-inc.com <mailto:network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com>, brock(a)anfani.com <mailto:brock@anfani.com> Atenciosamente, Rafael Doyle Equipe de Segurança Terra - Depto. de Abuse abuse(a)terra.com.br <mailto:abuse@terra.com.br> SAN - Servico de Atendimento Nacional Fax: (51) 3287-9087 ------------ Mensagem Original ------------ *De:* Luis Barzon [barzon@terra.com.br];abuse@terra.com.br *Enviada em:* 11/12/2012 15:15:49 *Para:* abuse(a)terra.com.br *Assunto:* Fwd: Olá =?iso-8859-1?Q? 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Hack attempts made to appear as exit node?
by Steve Snyder 06 Dec '12

06 Dec '12

I recent days I have gotten 3 complaints from people who report hack attempts from my exit node, at 82.221.99.229. One problem: this IP address is not in use by me and never has been. The RDNS for this address is "tor-exit.burratino.net" and there is the standard Tor explanatory page on http://82.221.99.229/. The "email the maintainer" is a mailto link to my e-mail address, thus the contacts from people reporting hack attempts. I guess that the page on port 80 was ripped from my actual exit although it is slightly different in that my page has my IP address on it, and http://82.221.99.229/ doesn't reference any particular IP address. Further, I can find no evidence ( https://metrics.torproject.org/exonerator.html ) that this IP address has ever actually run a Tor node. Am I crazy or is someone doing port-scanning and making it appear to be from a Tor exit node?

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Traffic pattern on Tor relay
by tor-admin 05 Dec '12

05 Dec '12

Hi, I am monitoring the network interface of my tor server with nload. From time to time nload shows strange traffic patterns: http://i.imgur.com/0Wr9h.png The graph is updated every second so one hash mark corresponds to one second. The most recent traffic value is on the right side. The graph shows that the traffic oscillates with a period of about 14 seconds and the traffic doubles in the peaks. Does anyone has an explanation of this pattern? Regards, Torland

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Prepared for [Raided for running a Tor exit node]?
by grarpamp 01 Dec '12

01 Dec '12

> Only regarding home Wireless access in the US > I was involved in a case with just this situation. > > According to my lawyer there is no consensus on who is responsible for wifi. > Every State has different laws each one is just a vague. > In NY, if your wireless is secured (pw protected) you are ok. > In NH, you are responsible for all data that passes your wifi point secured > or not. > In MA(my state) there is no specific law Putting links to such laws on the Tor wiki would be useful for operators and users to know. It would seem hard to believe that there are 'must secure' laws [1] in the US or elsewhere. Even harder that anyone would be sentenced... regardless of whether their AP is open, 12345, or dR;$8w@G... merely for traffic traversing their AP/node that was not theirs, or that cannot be proven was theirs. Not that you wouldn't be questioned, charged or held before the case was dropped. [1] There are 'must secure' civil ISP contracts. They are only meant to 'secure' more revenue (no account/line sharing) for the ISP and save revenue from dealing with whatever headaches your open AP/node creates. And criminal 'theft of service' laws for the same reasons. > you just need a good lawyer :) This (and links to the actual laws) are much easier to believe. Because if someone here took the NY example above literally and did illegal deeds via their secured wifi thinking that example was the law (and thus their immunity), they be jailed pretty quickly. And what does being forced to secure or responsible mean? If you hit a bug, exploit, or get cracked, and can show it, you're jailed? What if there is no proof either way but the existence of traffic, is the user then jailed by default? What if no evidence but crypted disk, or questions as to character/belief? In those crazy places even 100% lily white users would seem better off running an open AP/node and risking that lone lesser charge [2] than attempting to be rather secure, risking a crack, and being held responsible for some major crime. [2] If the major wasn't dropped, at least they'd be jailed with evidence the access was open, which looks a lot better than if it wasn't. The crazy is why you're supposed to visit, write, call and email your lawmakers, educate your executive, and hang your jury.

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tor-relays December 2012