[tor-talk] Question about possible increased risk of censorship when running (the same) Tor node as a relay and later as a bridge

[Kostas Jakeliunas <kostas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

has there been any discussion/research whether Tor bridges are more likely
to get blacklisted in censored areas if they'd been first run as simple
internal relays? The idea being, if a censorship system is fishing for Tor
nodes so they can be blacklisted on a per-IP-address basis and an internal
relay later on becomes a bridge but is using the same external IP address,
I suppose it is possible that it might get automatically blacklisted. Say
I'm a censor and I'm blacklisting all IPs found in the published
consensuses. I discover that someone is trying to connect to an IP
previously found on a consensus (and I recall all previous IPs) - I do not
do DPI - and simply block the connection due to IP address match. In this
case, it doesn't matter if the bridge could be found via bridgeDB, or if
it's doing pluggable transports. Any known cases/reports where this is
likely to have happened?

The reason I'm asking is, I've been running an internal Tor relay and am
considering making it to be an obfsproxy bridge; it would be the same IP
address. Perhaps this is inefficient, i.e. it is likely to have already
been blacklisted in many censored/important areas? I suppose it's also an
interesting question in itself, and it would be interesting to do some
experiments e.g. using OONI.

Thanks for any input
Kostas.
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