[tor-relays] Re: Shutting down my ~40 guards

[forest via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On 2026-10-12 13:45, boldsuck via tor-relays wrote:
> This will almost certainly be another multi-national law enforcement
> operation, similar to Operation Lobos, Habitance, or most recently,
> Liberty Lane.

I doubt that. What benefit would law enforcement get by forcing an onion
onto their own HSDir that they wouldn't get just by making a connection
to the service itself? The most they could do is censor it.

> There’s nothing the Tor devs can do about that, either.

What about limiting the number of BEGIN_DIR streams per circuit?

On 2026-10-12 13:52, Marco Moock via tor-relays wrote:
> Would it be acceptable for you to become middle-only?  A much better
> thing that shutting the relays down.

That's my short-term plan, yeah. The problem is that I currently have
the most diverse set of relays in terms of jurisdiction on the network,
and a lot of that has come from personally talking with the owners of
various hosting providers and convincing them to allow me to run relays.
But these attacks have soured their relationship with me due to the very
high CPU use and network use, so I'm not sure if they'll let me renew.

On 2026-10-12 20:33, boldsuck via tor-relays wrote:
> Law enforcement is killing the other 
> relays in order to collect the .onion addresses using their own HSDir

That was only possible in the v2 days, but v3 onion services are blinded
which means it's not possible to find out the .onion address even if you
are their HSDir. There's very little an attacker can do in the position
of HSDir besides selective censorship (if they already know the .onion,
they can match it to the descriptor and censor it).

CCing Tobias Höller who I know is working on HSDir research and might
have some insight into this whole situation.

Regards,
forest
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