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[tor-relays] Re: Tor People @ WHY2025



> 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.

That's a problem also experienced by the Snowflake bridges (being more
than a single tor instance per bridge), and something i have interest
in in the context of webtunnel + geodistributed websites (so again
multiple tor instances per bridge). In
https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/2023/foci-2023-0011.pdf section 3.2,
the Snowflake operators describe a workaround (basically freezing the
file), meaning the key becomes about as valuable as the identity key
(according to the paper), though you could imagine somehow re-creating
it manually and updating your static seed from time to time.

regards,
trinity-1686a


On Mon, 11 Aug 2025 at 15:49, Alexander Hansen Færøy via tor-relays
<tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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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