[tor-dev] Tor Relays on Whonix Gateway

[bancfc at openmailbox.org]

On 2016-10-17 10:24, isis agora lovecruft wrote:
> bancfc at openmailbox.org transcribed 1.7K bytes:
>> On 2016-10-17 03:04, teor wrote:
>> >>On 7 Oct 2016, at 08:11, bancfc at openmailbox.org wrote:
>> >>
>> >>Should Whonix document/encourage end users to turn clients into relays
>> >>on their machines?
>> >
>> >Probably not:
>> >* it increases the attack surface,
>> >* it makes their IP address public,
>> >* the relays would be of variable quality.
>> >
>> >Why not encourage them to run bridge relays instead, if their connection
>> >is
>> >fast enough?
>> 
>> Good idea. We are waiting for snowflake bridge transport to be ready 
>> and we
>> plan to enable it by default on Whonix Gateway. Its optimal because no 
>> port
>> forwarding is needed or changes to firewall settings (because VMs 
>> connect
>> from behind virtual NATs).
> 
> You're planning to enable "ServerTransportPlugin snowflake" on Whonix 
> Gateways
> by default?  And then "ClientTransportPluging snowflake" on 
> workstations
> behind the gateway?
> 


I was planning to enable the server by default (I thought WebRTC was P2P 
though) but after looking at it some more I don't think it's a good 
idea.

Not everyone is in a position to run a bridge because they may be living 
in a censored area themselves. It might also make Whonix users stand out 
if it was a default. Also Snowflake servers may actully be exposing 
themselves to privacy risks which is not something we are prepared to 
do:

"A popular privacy measure advocated to certain classes of users (eg: 
those that use VPN systems) has been to disable WebRTC due to the 
potential privacy impact. While this is not a concern for Tor Browser 
users using snowflake as a transport, there is a segment of people that 
view WebRTC as harmful to anonymity, and the volunteers that are 
contributing bandwidth are exposed to such risks. "

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/SnowFlakeEvaluation

***

Offtopic: I think a pluggable transport thats implemented with 
bittorrent would be awesome because of how widespread the protocol is 
and because of the existing infrastructure out there that users can 
potentially bootstrap off of if seed servers volunteer to run a bridge 
sever/facilitator.