[tor-relays] Suggestion to make Tor usage more disguised

[David Stainton]

Why would someone get into trouble for using Tor?
Furthermore, have you have heard of pluggable transports for Tor?

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Raúl Martínez <rme at rme.li> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am writing this message to make a simple suggestion that could help
> driving more adoption to Tor by making using tor less obvious for a network
> administrator.
>
> This suggestion tries to address the user case of a common Tor usage, in
> which the user is not being attacked nor mitm, he is just using tor in his
> work for example.
>
> The network admin of the office is not searching actively for Tor users in
> his network but one day he log-in in the router panel and he sees this:
>
> - Current conexions -
>
> WORKSTATION-98
> 38.29.00.2 [torproxy10.teaxxcu.com]
>
> Is obvious that is using tor. The network admin was not looking for Tor
> usage in his network but it saw this without looking for it. Now this worker
> can be in serious trouble for using Tor.
>
> So my suggestion is to set-up a custom hostname an a Tor-explaining html
> index ONLY in TOR EXIT nodes. They are the only nodes that can get in
> trouble and its helpful to advertise that they are tor nodes.
>
> ENTRY GUARD nodes should not advertise neither in the hostname nor in a
> HTML-index-page that they are Tor nodes. This way the network admin would
> only see an IP and a common hostname, that is a normal behaviour for a HTTPS
> request.
>
> So, having said that I encourage all Entry-Guard owners to unset his
> hostname and to disable the HTML-index-page. That could help a lot of Tor
> users to not draw unwanted attention.
>
>
> Obviously a network-admin can get a list of Tor relays and check if you are
> connecting to one of them but most of network-admins just take a look at his
> router info page without further investigation.
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
>
> TL;DR: I encourage all Entry-Guard owners to unset his hostname and to
> disable the HTML-index-page.
>
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