[tor-relays] Re: Tor People @ WHY2025

[Alexander Hansen Færøy via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 08/08/2025 19.13, Alexander Hansen Færøy via tor-relays wrote:
> Let's meet in 2 days, on Sunday, 2025-08-10, from 17:00 to 18:00, at the
> BornHack star tent in the Loud North cluster[1]. Both BornHack and
> ANDERSTORPSFESTIVALEN won't be blasting out music during this time, so
> we'll hopefully have a meeting where we can hear each other.
Hello Tor Relay Operators,

We had our meetup yesterday here at WHY2025. Here are my notes, based on my
memory and the whiteboard we used during the meeting. Thanks to everybody who
participated!

Announcements:
    - Alex talked about the upcoming community event in Denmark, and information
      on the event is available at https://tcg2025.4711.se/

Discussions:
    - The Future of Tor:
        - The group discussed concerns about Tor ("the company") and its base in
          the US with the current political situation there.
            - Alex described the current funding situation, particularly around
              the grants that he is aware of, that is primarily related to the
              Arti project, and how they are currently considered stable.
            - Discussions took place on whether it would be beneficial to
              establish a European alternative to Tor ("the company") in the
              future, considering the desired resilience properties that would
              help mitigate potential negative impacts if the US situation
              deteriorates.
        - What is the IPv6 situation with Tor?
            - Alex mentioned that he and GK had a discussion earlier this year
              about both a potential solution for having IPv6-only Middlenodes
              (in a network where all guards and all exits are dual-stack) and
              how one could do something similar to Happy Eyeballs within the
              Tor ecosystem. The former is largely a policy change, whereas the
              latter requires some changes in C Tor and Arti.
              A Tor spec proposal is needed, along with funding to build it.
            - It was mentioned that we should address the bridge situation with
              IPv6, as it is not in a good state.
        - Mixnets/Store and Forward inside the Tor ecosystem
            - We briefly discussed whether there were plans to add anything like
              that to the Tor ecosystem. Alex said that we had no such plans in
              the near future, with the ongoing work all being focused on
              getting Arti into the Tor Browser, VPN, and the Relay operators.
            - Alex added that if people attended Morgan's talk from the day
              before, they could imagine a world where Onion Service-based
              Instant Messengers would benefit from being able to do offline
              messaging.
        - Anonymity Properties and NetFlow trading
            - The group discussed the recent news about companies actively
              purchasing NetFlow data for analysis purposes.
            - Alex mentioned the recent work related to Website Traffic
              Fingerprinting and the padding layer in C Tor. The Network Team is
              currently working on integrating MaybeNot[1] in Arti for even
              stronger padding machines.
    - Status of Arti Relay:
        - Alex gave the group a short update on the current status of Arti
          Relays:
            - The Network Team is currently working on:
                - Simulation tooling with Shadow and Chutney.
                - Directory Authority support in Arti, including handling the
                  large number of different documents available via the
                  directory layer of Tor.
                - Core Relay functionality.
                - (Unrelated to Arti Relays) Conflux, Congestion Control, and
                  PoW (for services) have also been priorities recently, as they
                  overlap significantly, with some components serving both
                  client and relay-side needs.
            - We will have an open call for volunteers at a later point to help
              create a parallel Tor test network. Initially, it will consist of
              C Tor nodes, but we plan to experiment with Arti Relays there as
              development happens. We will likely need to reboot the network
              multiple times to prepare for the transition to the production Tor
              network.
    - Stateless Relays
        - The group discussed shortly the desire by some folks to experiment
          with stateless relays. The Italian group has been working in this
          space recently and provided a brief update on their progress.
        - We talked about problems related to the (relay) Onion Key when that is
          updated from a restarted stateless node, and what could be done about
          that.

Cheers,
Alex

[1]: https://github.com/maybenot-io/

--
Alexander Hansen Færøy
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