[tor-talk] [tor-relays] Strange BGP activity with my node

Mon May 14 21:36:24 UTC 2018

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 2:19 PM, charlie <contact at charlieluna.com> wrote:
> in the current state of society with certain governmental agencies
> performing things the way they are, i don't trust any ISP anymore or
> government agency anymore. the apology from that ISP, in my opinion, smells
> like the worst pile of crap ever. i don't buy it.
>
> i wish there was a way for us to run a TOR network without having to be on
> an ISP's network.

!gnitsop pot potS

That being said...

There are many ways...
- Start laying fiber / wifi to your neighbors, guerrilla networking, create
your own new global internets with your own new rules
- CJDNS, I2P, GNUnet, Tor, messaging ... all the various anonymous
encrypted overlays... they are their own "non ISP networks"...
run your own services on them, they're likely better than nothing.
- Do you really need to be giving Alexa Top 100 access to your life
and asshole... especially anymore now that decentralized models
and software are rolling out...

As far as this BGP event, as someone noted earlier,
commercial [subscription based] "security" services deploy many
potential means for themselves and their customers, including acting within
their routing infrastructures, to blackhole / filter / snoop traffic destined
to external risks deemed. No different than adblock, "hosts" files, etc.
So long as it's not default deny, packets can still get out,
somewhere, to the equivalent of bridges / vpn's / proxies as need be.

Their explanation is within plausible ops legitimacy.
As is questioning trust in aforesaid entities... you certainly
can't do an inspection on either of them, yet you still give
them your dollars. That's quite funny.

Again, more interesting would be looking for and
analysing attacks against the tor nodes (and those
of other networks) as a whole.

Unfortunately no one's researched that yet here.
Perhaps because Tor [izens] keeps shouting "sniffing bad",
thus programming out one of the tech needed to do that.
And other attacks, such as potential bgp steering,
sybils, the network paths, etc, are also less discussed [1].
Or because coordination is hard.
Oh well... Demons lurk where Sun never peeks.

At least tor doesn't use dns to bootstrap and run,
that would be a whole other layer of attack surface.

[1] For example, after years of mentions, there's still
no voluntary meetup PKI WoT cross certification / inspection /
identification, statistical / checklist, jurisdiction / AS / location,
whatever else, based node analysis and selection project to which
users could potentially subscribe their clients to. All networks to date
still use effectively random free-for-all node selection. That's reasonable
in some threat models, but without the research and attempted
construction and deployment of alternate selection models
operating voluntarily in parallel... it's quite possibly a lurkers paradise.

> On 05/14/2018 10:39 AM, Trevor Ellermann wrote:
>
> Thanks for the responses. To follow up this is how the offending ISP
> responded to our inquiries. I do not believe any further follow up is
> necessary.
>
> *snip*
> Thank you for getting in touch.
>
> I am afraid an engineer made an error in the BGP configuration of one of our
> devices earlier this afternoon, which resulted in a number a host routes
> being inadvertently announced to certain of our upstream providers.
>
> The route itself existed as part of a set of prefixes internally routed to
> null on our network.  This particular IP hosts a TOR relay node, and while
> that is perfectly legitimate we have a business requirement to block access
> to these internally:
>
> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/383D6E34D9BEA92E97092B134A708EEF476DF2E4
>
> The route should never have been announced outside our own AS.
> Unfortunately due to human error it was advertised earlier today (May 9th)
> from approx. 11:04 to 11:10 UTC.  I can assure you this was an unintentional
> error, we had no desire to interrupt or affect communications outside our
> AS.  The mistake was quickly spotted by our own NOC team and reverted.
>
> I hope you can accept our sincere apologies for this issue, we have taken
> steps to ensure that any similar mistake will not have such impact in
> future.
> *snip*
>
> On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 11:54 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 2:06 PM, Trevor Ellermann <trevor at ellermann.net>
>> wrote:
>> > I just a notification from my data center that someone is trying to
>> > hijack
>> > the IP of my exit node. Seems like the sort of thing someone might do
>> > when
>> > trying to attack Tor. I'm in a very remote area with limited access but
>> > any
>> > suggestions on actions I should take?
>>
>> Make sure your box and keys aren't compromised.
>> If that's ok, best they can do if the announcements are
>> listened to is camp on the ip for a while using their own keys,
>> (there might be some identification attacks made possible with
>> such a transient reroute,) circuits would fail till the consensus
>> updated to them, but there could be some duplicate ip split horizon
>> issues involved due to filtering.
>> If they hacked the boxes there's hardly need to expend noisy
>> reroutes when they can do most attacks using the box itself.
>>
>> Hop on the route servers or your other favorite interfaces
>> to the net and analyze who all is announcing /32's trying to
>> cover any other tor nodes.
>>
>> Sane isp's will filter such things without prior coordination. It's fairly
>> rare,
>> and for them to bother giving customers courtesy reports. Though
>> depending on nature of ticket / relationship with GBLX, you might want
>> to reply saying you've never worked with Asavie and don't approve
>> of the action regarding your IP.
>>
>> You can also search AS200005 to see what kind of heat
>> they catch from other operators / internet analysis tools.
>>
>> > ====================================================================
>> > Possible Prefix Hijack (Code: 10)
>> > ====================================================================
>> > Your prefix:          204.17.32.0/19:
>> > Prefix Description:   GBLX-US-BGP
>> > Update time:          2018-05-09 12:11 (UTC)
>> > Detected by #peers:   1
>> > Detected prefix:      204.17.56.42/32
>> > Announced by:         AS200005 (Asavie Technologies Limited)
>> > Upstream AS:          AS200005 (Asavie Technologies Limited)
>> > ASpath:               200005
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > https://torstatus.blutmagie.de/router_detail.php?FP=383d6e34d9bea92e97092b134a708eef476df2e4
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