Block directory authorities, is it possible?

[Shava Nerad]

At 04:41 AM 1/12/2007, Pei Hanru wrote:
>Well, Tor will finally recover here when the fibers are repaired. But
>this reminds me of a possible attack against the Tor network, say, if
>the notorious Great Firewall of China blocks *all* the connections to
>*all* the directory authorities (currently 5 I believe), then Tor will
>will become completely useless in China. Considering the number of
>directory authorities, this doesn't seem to be infeasible. (In fact, I
>think this is easy to some extent.)
>
>Am I understanding correctly? Are there any actions Tor can take? After
>all, we cannot simply assume this will not happen in the future.

You are correct that this is a vulnerability now.  We're developing a 
blocking resistance strategy that should ameliorate this 
risk.  Perhaps one of the developers will comment on this further.

Thanks!


Shava Nerad
Executive Director
The Tor Project
http://tor.eff.org/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anonymous/
shava at freehaven.net
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