[tor-talk] Convergence and Exit Nodes

[Sean Alexandre]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 04:49:20PM +0200, Sebastian G. <bastik.tor> wrote:
> What might work is too pull some resource over two different circuits,
> preferably with two different exits and compare the data you've got at
> the client or past that. For example does 'en.wikipedia.org' resolve to
> 91.198.174.225 for both circuits?

To take this idea a step further, it might be possible to build a distributed
observatory. Each node of the observatory would be a simple daemon that does
random HTTP requests and records any interesting responses.

The responses could be shared out to a central repository where another tool,
or tools, could be used to mine it and look for problems.

Since the responses are saved, they could be injected back into a VM running
a Tor Browser Bundle to investigate further.

Other possibilities/enhancements:

- An observatory node could be configured to work with a DNS resolver to send
  requests to servers that may have a higher likelihood of returning
  interesting results, where that's possible.

- Exit nodes could be configured to run an observatory node directly, so
  traffic wouldn't consume Tor network bandwidth.