[tor-relays] Qualities of a good relay (Sean Saito)

[Steve Snyder]

On Tuesday, June 23, 2015 9:07pm, saitosean at ymail.com said:

> Besides the obvious requirements of a good relay (e.g. speed, geo-diversity,
> constant uptime), what qualities make a relay valuable to the Tor network and its
> users?

A quality that can't be measured: resistence to intrusion.

On second thought, that can be evaluated from outside to a certain extent.  What ports on the server are open in addition to the OrPort/DirPort?  Can the OS be fingerprinted to reveal an unsupported (and therefore unpatched) version? 

I worry about those relays with a heroic uptime.  How is it that they haven't needed to reboot in, say, nine months? No security updates to the kernel or glibc in all that time?  Really?

In these days when governments, with their expertise and multi-billion-dollar budgets, get infiltrated I wonder how easy it would be get some monitoring malware onto machines that run Tor relays.  That seems a lot more likely to me than the scare stories about the NSA/GCHQ running a lot of nodes themselves.
 
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/7489E8EDD0B8B68C8A2CB31D2B56B6572091DA7F