Re: [tor-relays] GeoIP file

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 11:49:58AM +1000, teor wrote:
> > There is fresh geoip data posted on maxmind.com monthly.  Doesn't it
> > make sense to have the daemon use it?
> 
> No, we process the file, and update it when we do a release.
> And at that point, the tor daemon is restarted anyway.
> 
> GeoIP is not that accurate anyway, particularly for servers.
> So there's no need to have it updated every month rather than every
> release.

Also, having relays and clients not splintering the anonymity sets could
be smart. If everybody has a slightly different geoip file, especially
if only a few people have some of the differences, that could be bad
news. For an example, say there's a country that had no entries last
month, but now has a few entries, and only a few relays switch to the
new geoip file, and there's a user who connects from that address block.

We already have things splintered by Tor releases, but at least there
aren't that many of them, and most relays are on one of a handful of
versions.

> Also, if tor retrieved the file from maxmind.com directly, that could
> cause all sorts of load, privacy, and security issues.

That design (well, retrieving from the directory authorities, not from
maxmind) was actually one that we considered:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/126-geoip-reporting.txt#n186

--Roger


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