Hello,
I just had the idea which can help to protect exit-nodes against some
kinds of legal prosecution. Basically, it would be policy to Tor servers
which says "do not connect into country XY". Such a rule does not increase
anonymity but would require that legal actions (e.g. confiscations) must
be performed in another country than this where the crime happened. This
is a much higher hurdle, especially for lower delinquencies.
I see two steps how this policy can be implemented:
A. On client side
1. add a new option, e.g. 'Jurisdiction' with possible values of
* 'other' ... when set, do not use an exit-node when it is the same
jurisdiction as the target-ip; this should be the
default on new installations
* 'same' ... use an exit-node only, when it is in the same
jurisdiction (just for completeness...)
* 'ignore' ... ignore jurisdiction (same behavior as now)
* a country code ... use only exit-nodes within this country; a
negated format should exist too
2. when choosing path, use only exit-nodes which are following the
constraint above
B. On (exit-)node side
1. add a new option, e.g. 'JurisdictionPolicy' which accepts country
codes and perhaps special values like '%same'. Behavior is similar
to the client side option mentioned above
2. Tor protocol/meta data must be changed to transmit this option
3. node forbids connections which are violating the policy
The decision whether a node and a target are in the same jurisdiction can
be done e.g. by a GeoIP like service. A problem might be the license:
GeoIP is GPL, Tor is BSD. Dunno, whether the database can be used freely
and Tor has to implement own parsing routines. Perhaps, similar projects
exist.
Enrico
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