Re: weird path selection

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 08:53:24AM -0500, Scott Bennett wrote:
>      Someone is up to some shenanigans, methinks.  Or perhaps someone's
> copy of tor has a newly discovered bug.  I just noticed an odd message
> go by, so I checked the current log file to see how often it was happening.
> It turns out it's happening fairly frequently.  So far, there have been 348
> of them today, beginning with
> 
> May 24 02:08:04.193 [info] connection_or_connect(): Client asked me to connect to myself. Refusing.

Interesting. Yeah, I've been seeing these lately as well. I added some
more logging, and it looks like the "Client" is actually a wide variety
of previous Tor relays. So somebody out there is trying to build paths
"..., X, moria2, moria2" where X varies widely.

Is it an attack? I dunno what they'd be attacking.

My guesses are either a) an alternative Tor client that didn't think very
hard about its path selection, or b) a scientist experimenting with Tor
paths who again didn't think very hard about path selection.

Alas, it appears that tracking down who it is will be hard. They seem to
be using an anonymity system. ;)

Thanks,
--Roger