Hi, I am writing this message to make a simple suggestion that could help driving more adoption to Tor by making using tor less obvious for a network administrator.
This suggestion tries to address the user case of a common Tor usage, in which the user is not being attacked nor mitm, he is just using tor in his work for example.
The network admin of the office is not searching actively for Tor users in his network but one day he log-in in the router panel and he sees this:
- Current conexions -
WORKSTATION-98 38.29.00.2 [torproxy10.teaxxcu.com]
Is obvious that is using tor. The network admin was not looking for Tor usage in his network but it saw this without looking for it. Now this worker can be in serious trouble for using Tor.
So my suggestion is to set-up a custom hostname an a Tor-explaining html index ONLY in TOR EXIT nodes. They are the only nodes that can get in trouble and its helpful to advertise that they are tor nodes.
ENTRY GUARD nodes should not advertise neither in the hostname nor in a HTML-index-page that they are Tor nodes. This way the network admin would only see an IP and a common hostname, that is a normal behaviour for a HTTPS request.
So, having said that *I encourage all Entry-Guard owners to unset his hostname and to disable the HTML-index-page*. That could help a lot of Tor users to not draw unwanted attention.
Obviously a network-admin can get a list of Tor relays and check if you are connecting to one of them but most of network-admins just take a look at his router info page without further investigation.
Thanks for your time.
TL;DR: I encourage all Entry-Guard owners to unset his hostname and to disable the HTML-index-page.