[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

Re: [tor-talk] Why does requesting for bridges by email require a Yahoo or Gmail address?



Food for thought: How much do you think it would cost per email to have
the same thing (collecting a heap of bridges) done via Mechanical Turk,
etc.?


On 07/24/2014 05:16 PM, Mirimir wrote:
> On 07/24/2014 02:36 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 03:24:26PM -0500, Cypher wrote:
>>> In light of the last year of disclosures by Edward Snowden, why is Tor
>>> requiring that I establish an account with an email provider that is
>>> completely out of my control and has a general history of complying with
>>> law enforcement data requests? Why those two providers specically?
>>
>> Because we need an adequately popular provider that makes it hard to
>> generate lots of addresses. Otherwise an attacker could make millions
>> of addresses and "be" millions of different people asking for bridges.
>>
>> https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/blocking.html#tth_sEc7.4
> 
> That totally makes sense.
> 
>> (Also, it recently became clear that it would be useful for people to
>> access this provider via https, rather than http, so a network adversary
>> can't just sniff the bridge addresses off the Internet when the user
>> reads her mail. And it would also be nice to not use providers that turn
>> their entire email databases over to the adversary, even unwittingly.
>> Lots of adversaries and lots of goals to manage at once here.)
>>
>> --Roger
> 
> Right, and with HTTPS, users' ISPs (and their friends) can't even see
> that bridges are being provided. Does the bridge database talk directly
> with Google and Yahoo mail servers, to prevent possible XKeyScore snooping?
> 

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

-- 
tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe or change other settings go to
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk