[tor-relays] Authority Nodes

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 07:10:43AM -0300, Vitor Milagres wrote:
> I see the Authority Nodes are located only in North America and Europe.
> I would like to contribute to the TOR network as much as possible. I am
> currently running a node and I would like to make it an Authority Node as
> well.
> I am from Brazil and I believe it would possibly be a good idea to have a
> new Authority Node in South America.
> What are the requirements? What should I do to become one of them?
> FYI, the node I am running is 79DFB0E1D79D1306AF03A4B094C55A576989ABD1

Thanks for your interest in running a directory authority! Long ago we
wrote up a set of goals for new directory authorities:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/attic/authority-policy.txt

It is definitely an informal policy at this point, but it still gets
across some of the requirements.

If you're able to run an exit relay at your location, that's definitely
more useful than another directory authority at this point.

Also, because we haven't automated some steps, each new directory
authority that we add means additional coordination complexity, especially
when we identify misbehaving relays and need to bump them out of the
network quickly.

Here are two big changes since that document:

(1) The directory authorities periodically find themselves needing to
scale to quite large bandwidths -- sustaining 200mbit at a minimum,
and being able to burst to 400mbit or 500mbit, is pretty much needed at
this point:
https://bugs.torproject.org/33018

(2) Tor ships with hundreds of hard-coded relays called Fallback
Directories, which distribute the load for bootstrapping into the Tor
network, and which also provide alternate access points if the main
directory authorities are blocked.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors
So while the directory authorities are still a trust bottleneck,
they are less of a performance bottleneck than they used to be.

In summary: if you want to run a directory authority, your next step
is to join the Tor community, get to know us and get us to know you,
come to one of the dev meetings (once the world is able to travel
again), and see where things go from there.

Thanks,
--Roger