[tor-relays] Re: Tor Relay Operator Meetup at 39c3

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

Hello Tor Relay Operators!

Hope you all got home from congress, made it well into 2026, and are ready for 
whatever craziness this year may bring.

As usual, we had a well-visited relay operator meetup during the 39th Chaos 
Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, last week. Big thanks to Leibi for 
getting this setup!

Unfortunately, I didn't take notes during the event, but I am going to add a 
dump of my memory here for the community to see.

Leibi welcomed the participants when we arrived, and mentioned that we only had 
the room for an hour. We found out that four groups had smaller presentations 
they wanted to share with the community.

Alex (me) started by giving an update from Tor's Network Team on 2025 and 2026. 
The slides from this presentation are available at 
https://ahf.me/talks/2025/12/30/tor-relay-operators-meetup/ and they were 
deliberately designed with lots of text, so people should be able to understand 
them without a recording or summary. As part of the presentation, I mentioned 
that we would be doing more "Community Days" events in 2026, and that there will 
be more information about the next one in Denmark in the next couple of days.

Alex (not me) and Christopher (I think that was the name, but please correct me 
if I am wrong here) from Emerald Onion gave a presentation on their vision for 
evolving their Tor Relay security architecture. The focus here was on a more 
stateless architecture, where we can eventually perform remote attestation of 
the relays and protect individual relays using new features in AMD's SEV-SNP 
feature set for virtual machine integrity and isolation. There were no slides; 
instead, they went over the blog post they published at 
https://blog.emeraldonion.org/evolving-our-tor-relay-security-architecture which 
I recommend to everybody excited about building even safer ways to run Tor 
relays at scale. At the end of the presentation, they mentioned that buying new 
CPUs for experimentation was expensive and that they were seeking funding. Their 
donation page can be found at https://emeraldonion.org/donate/

The Foundation for Applied Privacy presented their annual report on how their 
setup is going and what happened in 2025. As part of this, they mentioned their 
interesting Mastodon post (which did indeed become my favorite social media post 
of 2025) about receiving offers to sell their Tor exit capacity to an adversary, 
and they shared their reflections on the situation. You can find their Mastodon 
post at https://mastodon.social/@applied_privacy/115612416188501042. I didn't 
catch a link to their presentation, but maybe they can add it as a reply to this 
email. You can also donate to these folks at https://applied-privacy.net/donate/

Finally, there was a presentation from someone whose name I did not catch, who 
used the same tooling that the Foundation of Applied Privacy has been building 
over the last few years. Please link to your presentation if possible to this 
thread :-)

We had a few minutes for Q&A, and I remember three questions from this period:

1. One cypherpunk mentioned they were making custom postcards that relay 
operator communities could sell during the Chaos events to raise funds.

2. One cypherpunk asked about a potential bug where the key pinning the 
directory authorities does to enforce that RSA and the ed25519 identity keys of 
the relays mustn't individually rotate during the lifetime of a relay, but they 
had a situation where this had enforcement had failed at first, but when they 
wanted to switch back to the old tuple of keys, the directory authorities 
refused this. Alex (me) had no good answers to this, but it sounds like the 
person asking the question was in contact with Roger about this. Do we have a 
ticket for this? It sounds like a bug to me.

3. A couple of cypherpunks were eager to start using Tor 0.4.9.x due to the 
arrival of Happy Families. Alex is going to talk with David Goulet (the 
maintainer of C Tor) about when we think we can get this out on our stable 
channel and get back to people with an update once he has more information. Alex 
also mentioned that we probably want to do a relatively quick upgrade cycle for 
this, particularly for the large relay families, as we are going to make the 
life for Tor users on Apple's iOS platforms more miserable before it hopefully 
gets better, and we can retire the classic family system.

At the very end, during the chaos of us having to leave the room and the next 
crowd arrival, Kantorkel mentioned that if groups are looking for funding to run 
relays or build better relay infrastructure, they can reach out to him, and the 
CCC may be able to help!

Afterwards, we all left the room, but people continued talking for a bit as part 
of the usual hallway track.

People who participated and have more context, please add it to this thread. The 
folks who presented can link to their slides if they wish to!

Thanks to everybody who participated, and again, to Leibi for getting us a 
conference room during the event! The following European events that will have 
Tor people attending are FOSDEM, BornHack, and 40C3.

Cheers,
Alex

--
Alexander Hansen Færøy
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