Tor users rely on the Tor network to forward their traffic to it's destination and to achieve the desired privacy and anti-censorship properties. The Tor network is open and everyone can add Tor relays, which will be distributed for use by Tor clients. This does not attract altruistic volunteers only. While the Tor network has significantly grown over the past few years, the fraction of somewhat know operators has not increased to the same degree and today's Tor network is significantly different when compared with the Tor network 5 years ago. The bandwidth over time graph shows how much capacity has been added in recent years: https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.html?start=2015-06-01&end=2021-08-01 In this talk we will describe why some level of trust in the Tor network is needed to achieve its privacy properties. After going through some examples of large scale malicious Tor relay groups, and current issues with tackling them, we describe a new additional approach to reduce the risks of malicious Tor relays on Tor users. We aim to empower Tor users for self-defense without completely depending on the detection and removal of malicious Tor relays from the network.
Speakers: content by nusenu