[tor-relays] Re: Shutting down my ~40 guards

[Red Oaive via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2026-10-22 13:38, David Goulet via tor-relays wrote:
affecting the network. Next release (soon!) will most likely have them 
in.
> It will be a fun one because to be effective, we will need most of the 
> relays
> to upgrade so to avoid degradation.

If you cannot implement effective directory rate limiting for an 
individual relay, then please, simply expose an attack in the logs!  In 
fact, please do this too whatever other mitigations you implement.

Currently internal over-tor attacks cannot be easily mitigated at the 
operator level through effective firewalling because there is no 
reporting surface to parse to craft an nft / iptables rule.  Any time an 
attack is occurring and over-limit directory requests are detected from 
any one relay, simply expose that in the logs.  Tor is allergic to 
proper logging, for perhaps good overarching reasons.  That said, 
over-limit directory accesses can only have one purpose and exposing the 
offender's IP in the relay's logs is not a privacy issue.

Moreover, this arms every single operator with the tools we need to 
combat this.

In the short term, an entry in the global log is fine.  In the medium 
term consider a separate "external attack" log file or socket that can 
itself be easily parsed that contains only these reports.

The former is an hour's work for someone familiar with the code base.  
The latter perhaps two or three.

In the longer term, this also arms the directory authorities with the 
ability to propagate IP-level blocking suggestions to the entire tor 
relay network for many other types of attacks by simply propagating 
agreed on bad actors to relays which simply then expose those in the 
log.  Every relay operator implementing a log parser will block those 
offending IP's overnight.

  Oaive / Redwave
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