Re: another seeming attack on my server's DirPort

[Mike Cardwell <tor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kyle Williams wrote:

> This is just a theory, no hard facts to back it up.
> When I'm messing around with Tor's ControlPort, I've noticed that my Tor 
> traffic just hangs until whatever I'm doing on the ControlPort stops.  
> There have been a couple of times where I do something very wrong on the 
> controlport and Tor just "freezes" (does not route any traffic) until I 
> close my connection with the ControlPort.   I'm wondering if the same is 
> true for when someone is fetching descriptors from the DirPort?
>
> Does Tor traffic "freeze" (not route traffic) until the Dirport 
> completes its task?
>
> Next guess...
> If someone where to be attacking, oh say, a hidden service, and your 
> node was the Introduction Point for that hidden service, then perhaps 
> someone is trying to force the owner of the hidden service to choose a 
> new introduction point.
>
> What is the uptime of your node? 
> Have you typically been running it for a long time?
> If someone is DoSing your Dirport, why not just turn it off?

Alternatively, if you've got an Apache reverse proxy in front of your 
DirPort as described in the manual, you could perhaps implement per IP, 
connection and bandwidth rate limiting with mod_cband. Just a thought.

Mike