[tor-talk] Why make bad-relays a closed mailing list?

[Philipp Winter]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 01:58:18PM -0700, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Roger Dingledine writes:
> 
> > But in this particular case I'm stuck, because the arms race is so
> > lopsidedly against us.
> > 
> > We can scan for whether exit relays handle certain websites poorly,
> > but if the list that we scan for is public, then exit relays can mess
> > with other websites and know they'll get away with it.
> 
> I think the remedy is ultimately HTTPS everywhere.  Then the problem
> is reduced to checking whether particular exits try to tamper with the
> reliability or capacity of flows to particular sites, or with the public
> keys that those sites present.  (And figuring out whether HTTPS and its
> implementations are cryptographically sound.)

It's not just about HTTP.  We've also seen attacks targeting SSH, SMTP,
IMAP, FTP, and XMPP.  While SSH's trust-on-first-use works reasonably
well and MitM attacks tend to be ineffective, XMPP is a different story
with at least one major client having had issues with authentication.

Cheers,
Philipp