Re: [tor-dev] New Paper: Cloud-based Onion Routing

[Brandon Wiley <brandon@xxxxxxxxx>]

Cool stuff. I like how the system can be automated and self-funding.

With regards to bootstrapping, giving out one node at a time is not a useful defense because requests can be parallelized. [1] Moving nodes is similarly useless because the attacker can continually map the network using free parallelized requests. Therefore, requesting a node address needs to cost something. [2] Since you already have tokens, you can just make it cost a token to request a node address.

To solve the initial introduction problem, you need to include fresh node addresses with the distribution of the executable. You could in fact dispense with the directory servers, which add no defense, and include fresh node addresses with each executable upon download. For instance, with BitTorrent we had a neat trick where we would encode the URL to a torrent file at the end of the uTorrent executable (dynamically for each user when they downloaded it from the web server) and the program new how to look for and extract this URL upon startup. If present, uTorrent would automatically start downloading this torrent. You could use a similar technique here. Much as above, getting fresh peers, in this case by downloading the executable, should cost something so that it can't be parallelized for free.

An alternative to paying per node address is to pay to establish an identity and then use a DHT to map node addresses to identities so that you have a way to obtain new addresses as they change due to churn, but mapping the whole network requires multiple identities and so once again incurs a linear cost. [2]

Best of luck with your project!

[1] Sybil attack
[2] Arcadia

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 6:32 PM, Nick Jones <najones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Aaron wrote:

> I have a few questions
>
> Q1: Regarding network bootstrap protocol: Consider the scenario where
> a censor mines the boostrap node list and blocks these nodes. Do you
> implement any mechanisms to prevent a censor from obtaining the entire
> set of bootstrap nodes? Similarly, aren't public directory servers
> also vulnerable to censorship?
>

Currently, we don't have any major protection from enumerating the list of bootstrapping nodes.
It is definitely a problem we are aware of, and we're thinking about possible ways to protect
them. In our design, we only give out one bootstrapping node at a time, with the hope that this
makes enumerating them somewhat more difficult. Additionally, if we can detect that a
bootstrapping node has been blocked, we can use the elasticity of cloud hosting to move it to a
new IP or a new cloud. Admittedly, this may devolve into a cat and mouse game of moving the
bootstrapping nodes around.

Similarly, since you learn about the bootstrapping nodes through the directories, the directories
have many of the same problems and solutions. If the directories stay at a static IP/DNS name,
then they will be blocked quickly. However, if the user still has a cached valid directory from the
last time he was connected to COR, he could build a circuit and then retrieve an updated directory,
assuming at least some of the nodes from the last directory retrieval were still active. We can
move the directories around within the cloud, but then you need a "directory of directories", and
that gets messy.

Admittedly, our system doesn't fundamentally solve the bootstrapping problem (of new users
gaining access), but we hope that it makes it more difficult for existing users to be blocked.

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