[tor-talk] reply to: Tor survey

[Marco Valerio Barbera]

Hello everyone,

some of you received an email message from me a few hours ago about a
survey I am doing on the effectiveness on a DoS attack on the Tor
Network. I am writing you because I received a few, worried, private
messages asking me to give some more detail about it on this mailing
list.

As I stated in the email I sent, the aim of my study is that of
evaluating whether a certain DoS attack that uses the Tor protocol
constitutes a real danger to the Tor Network or not. The DoS attack I
am taking in consideration tries to keep a Tor Relay busy performing
expensive cryptographic operations making it impossible for it to
process requests coming from honest clients/relays.

I'm investigating on the actual amount of resources an attacker would
need to tear down a given percentage of the Tor Relays operating
today. The reason for the survey was, then, that of having a rough
estimate on the effective speed of current Tor Relays in performing a
given set of cryptographic operations.

I realize that all this could have been avoided if I had previously
sent a notification about my survey here. I sincerely apologize for
any inconvenience I created to the Tor community.

mb.