On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Steve Snyder swsnyder@snydernet.net wrote:
I'm wondering about the benefit of running abridge on an IPv6 address.
Since the big announcement last December that v0.2.3.9 supports IPv6 addresses for bridges, I've read a few comments to the affect that BridgDB doesn't understand IPv6 addresses.
So... what is the state of publishing IPv6 bridge addresses? Will clients requesting a bridge address ever be given an IPv6 address? Can a client specifically request an IPv6 address (or IPv4 address, for that matter)?
Yep!
see: https://bridges.torproject.org/?ipv6=True or email bridges@torproject.org with the keyword "ipv6" in the subject or body.
But...
Right now there aren't a lot of IPv6 bridges -- some were assigned to the email distributor, and some were assigned to the https distributor. The latter splits bridges into 5 groups, and depending on your source IP address you may be lucky enough to get an IPv6 bridge [1].
Meanwhile, we hand out a few IPv6 bridges to everyone who visits https://bridges.torproject.org, and the link to query specifically for IPv6 addresses isn't yet publicly displayed on bridges.torproject.org to avoid confusion/support emails.
Once there are enough [2] IPv6 bridges, the above link will be on the front page of https://bridges.torproject.org. See: https://tor.extc.org for an example.
--Aaron
p.s. It's a similar situation with obfsproxy bridges; you can request bridges with a specified transport via https://bridges.torproject.org/?transport=TRANSPORT_NAME, e.g. https://bridges.torproject.org/?transport=obfs2 or adding the keywords "transport TRANSPORT_NAME" to the body or subject of an email to bridges@torproject.org
[1] Try requesting bridges with TorBrowser -- the set of IP addresses corresponding to Tor exits get IPv6 (and obfs2) bridges.
[2] Every IP group has at least one IPv6 bridge