[tor-talk] Tor Bridge vs Tor Exit?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 12:58:55AM -0700, George Grantham wrote:
> I've heard that Tor Bridges and Tor exits are both within serious demand.
> 
> At this point in time within the Tor Network, are Tor Bridges with obfs4
> pluggable transports at a greater need, or are Tor exit nodes?

I think exit relays is the right answer here, if all else is equal on
your side.

In favor of exit relays:
1) Not everybody is in a position to run an exit relay, so if you can
you should.
2) More exit relays can make Tor faster for everybody.
3) More exit relays (in more diverse locations) can make Tor more
anonymous for everybody, since it increases the variety of places that
adversaries have to watch.

Whereas on the obfs4 bridge side, right now our bridge address
distribution strategies are not very robust against the steps China takes
to discover the bridge addresses, and bridges are overkill basically
every other place besides China. So running a few more obfs4 bridges,
without also improving the distribution strategies, might not end up
benefiting as many people as you hope. Really we ought to do a push to
distribute bridges better, in parallel to asking people to run a lot
more of them, in parallel to making it super easy for people to run
them (apt-get install ..., done). For the first piece, see the "Salmon"
paper from this year's PETS for some ideas:
https://censorbib.nymity.ch/pdf/Douglas2016a.pdf
but that's really a whole separate topic, and historically it also
turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. :)

And see also
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#RelayOrBridge

Thanks for wanting to help users!
--Roger