Re: What are Tor guards?

[Shachar Shemesh <shachar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#EntryGuards
>
> Also see Section 5 of
> https://tor.eff.org/svn/trunk/doc/spec/path-spec.txt
>
>   
Let's see if I got this straight. The Entry Guards are "more trusted"
ORs, hand picked by.... who? According to what criteria? They obviously
need to have a high uptime, and relatively high bandwidth, but is that it?

I gave a lecture about Tor a few weeks ago (the actual protocol) to a
highly technical crowed, and the same point kept coming up. The protocol
is great, but the whole method by which ORs are added to the list means
that you either add anyone who comes up (in which case, someone with a
lot of resources can flood the network with compromised ORs) - I know,
you will tell me that that's why the guarded entry nodes are picked, or
you need to trust the people maintaining the OR list (i.e. - there is a
single point of trust after all).

Any comments?

Shachar