[tor-talk] Does obfsproxy make any sense for relays

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 05:04:47PM +0100, MacLemon wrote:
> I was wondering if building tor with obfsproxy would make any sense for a relay. The documentation suggests that obfsproxy is rather exclusive for bridges yet isn?t absolutely clear about that.
> 
> The only scenario I can fabricate is someone blocking tor by DPI, being confident that they can block any tor traffic and subsequently doesn?t bother to explicitly block relay IPs anymore. Doesn?t seem too realistic to me.

Actually, this scenario happens in practice in Iran.

> Would it hurt to implement obfsproxy into a relay?

Somebody needs to sit down and solve
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1776
first, or clients that configure your relay as their bridge will
trigger an assert after a while. Solving it involves refactoring how
we keep track of what purpose each descriptor is for. (In the past,
small bandaids have turned out not to be a good idea.)

--Roger