Re: [tor-relays] Handling abuse - like to get your help please

[Pascal Schuppli <pschuppli@xxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, June 21, 2016 09:52:43 AM Tristan wrote:
> But the point of Tor is to promote open access to the Internet. Once Tor
> starts filtering traffic, it's no better than the government censorship so
> many people use Tor to get around. They'd go from one filter to another.

This is not such an absolute truth as you make it sound.

A filter running on the exit node that kicks in, say, when it detects five 
hundred http connections from the same middle relay in under ten seconds (or 
whatever would be considered clearly obvious "undesirable behaviour" - would 
not trigger for 99% of legitimate uses of tor. 

It's probably true that we could only detect a small fraction of all malicious 
traffic with high confidence, but if we could deter *some* obviously malicious 
traffic with a fairly low false-positive rate, then that's very far away from 
"government censorship", or switching one form of censorship for another. For 
example, it would never trigger on the poor chinese or iranian blogger 
blogging about government brutality, which is one of the prime examples always 
cited when defending TOR.

Such filters wouldn't have to be mandatory; if you want to run an unrestricted 
exit node, the more power to you. But it would give people donating resources 
to TOR an additional argument: "Yes, the TOR people do care about abuse of 
their service, and they're trying to give people ways to address it". Relay 
operators would have  an additional option: Either run an unrestricted exit 
node, or run just a relay, or run an exit node filtering *some* obviously 
malicious traffic. This might lead to more people who'd be willing to donate 
exit bandwith.

On the client side, the tor process could flag circuits (locally) that use a 
filtered exit node so the tor browser could notify the user when an exit node 
might block legitimate traffic.

> I understand your point, but I don't think we can accurately detect
> malicious traffic without compromising the security of other Tor users.

I'm not sure how this would compromise the security of other Tor users.


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