[tor-dev] Open Proposals as of June 2012

[Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)]

On 6/19/12 2:30 AM, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
>>    146  Add new flag to reflect long-term stability
>>
>>      From time to time we get the idea of having clients ship with a
>>      reasonably recent consensus (or a list of directory mirrors),
>>      so instead of bootstrapping from one of the authorities, they
>>      can bootstrap from a regular directory cache.  The problem here
>>      is that by the time the client is run, most of the directory
>>      mirrors will be down or will have changed their IP.  This
>>      proposal tries to address that.
>>
>>      It needs analysis based on behavior of actual routers on the
>>      network to see whether it could work, and what parameters might
>>      work.
>>
>>      Nevertheless, we should really do something like this, so that
>>      we can ship a list of initial directory mirrors with Tor
>>      (possibly via the "fallback consensus" deisgn), so that new
>>      bootstrapping Tor clients don't all hammer the directory
>>      authorities. (6/2012)
> 
> I almost wonder if the guard flag is essentially the same set of
> constraints? I think we should discuss this at the TorDev in Italy if
> possible...

A part from the performance reason that's also a censorship-bypass reason.

For example currently in China all the TorDA are fully "IP Filtered" (
not even ping are allowed to those IP addresses).

That means that even if we found a way to fuck the GFW
active-probe-filter for a while, the Tor clients already existing and
residing in china would not be able to connect because they cannot reach
the "software-hard-coded" tor directory authority.

Imho it would be also required to consider, within that proposal, a way
to "dynamically" append the latests network-map available when a user is
going to download Tor.

That way when a release X is done, it automatically get the map of the
build-time.

But if everytime a user download the software, the latests network map
is populated, it would increase the chance to bypass static ip filters.


-naif