Re: TOR Blocked at Universities

[Michael Holstein <michael.holstein@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> TOR is now blocked campus-wide at Auburn University (for all 24,000 students) because of apparent attacks emanating from the TOR network. 

If your problem is anything like the one we had, I'm guessing the
"attacks" have more to do with the fact that many journal subscriptions
authenticate by IP address, thus, if someone has their client configured
to be an exit, people will readily find it and use it to download
en-masse from your very expensive journal memberships.

Let's not debate the stupidity of authenticating a network by IP address
.. but the above problem is ultimately what forced us to do the same
thing (although we just prohibit the operation of an exit). I should
note that the original effort to run an exit was conducted by myself,
and I do network security here .. but it was the complaints from the
library folks that got us into hot water .. there simply wasn't an easy
way to block access to all of them without an overly-complex exit
policy, and all of our IP space is within a single /16.

Cheers,

Michael Holstein
Cleveland State University
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