North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Tor and network security/administration

  • From: Steve Atkins
  • Date: Wed Jun 21 18:19:44 2006 
On Jun 21, 2006, at 2:53 PM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:


On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 05:02:47PM -0400, Todd Vierling wrote:

If the point of the technology is to add a degree of anonymity, you
can be pretty sure that a marker expressly designed to state the
message "Hi, I'm anonymous!" will never be a standard feature of said
technology.  That's a pretty obvious non-starter.

Which begs the original question of this thread which I started: with
that said, how exactly does one filter this technology?
Why bother?

If the traffic is abusive, why do you care it comes from Tor? If there's
a pattern of abusive traffic from a few hundred IP addresses, block
those addresses. If you're particularly prone to idiots from Tor (IRC,
say) then preemptively blocking them might be nice, but I doubt the
number of new Tor nodes increases at a fast enough rate for it to be
terribly interesting.

If you want to take legal action you know exactly who is responsible
for the traffic, so whether it's coming from a Tor exit node or not isn't
terribly interesting in that case either.

If you still do want to then there are some very obvious ways to do
so, combining a Tor client and a server you run.

(And this is from the perspective of someone who does not believe
there is any legitimate use for Tor at all.)

Cheers,
Steve