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77 lines
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77 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
Filename: 120-suicide-descriptors.txt
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Title: Suicide descriptors when Tor servers stop
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Version: $Revision$
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Last-Modified: $Date$
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Author: Roger Dingledine
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Created: 15-Aug-2007
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Status: Open
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Overview:
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Tor servers should publish a last descriptor whenever they shut down,
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to let others know that they are no longer offering service.
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The Problem:
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The main reason for this is in reaction to Internet services that want
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to treat connections from the Tor network differently. Right now,
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if a user experiments with turning on the "relay" functionality, he
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is punished by being locked out of some websites, some IRC networks,
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etc --- and this lockout persists for several days even after he turns
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the server off.
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Design:
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During the "slow shutdown" period if exiting, or shortly after the
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user sets his ORPort back to 0 if not exiting, Tor should publish a
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final descriptor with the following characteristics:
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1) Exit policy is listed as "reject *:*"
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2) It includes a new entry called "opt shutdown 1"
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The first step is so current blacklists will no longer list this node
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as exiting to whatever the service is.
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The second step is so directory authorities can avoid wasting time
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doing reachability testing. Authorities should automatically not list
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as Running any router whose latest descriptor says it shut down.
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[I originally had in mind a third step --- Advertised bandwidth capacity
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is listed as "0" --- so current Tor clients will skip over this node
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when building most circuits. But since clients won't fetch descriptors
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from nodes not listed as Running, this step seems pointless. -RD]
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Spec:
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TBD but should be pretty straightforward.
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Security issues:
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Now external people can learn exactly when a node stopped offering
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relay service. How bad is this? I can see a few minor attacks based
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on this knowledge, but on the other hand as it is we don't really take
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any steps to keep this information secret.
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Overhead issues:
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We are creating more descriptors that want to be remembered. However,
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since the router won't be marked as Running, ordinary clients won't
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fetch the suicide descriptors. Caches will, though. I hope this is ok.
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Implementation:
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To make things easy, we should publish the suicide descriptor only
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on controlled shutdown (SIGINT as opposed to SIGTERM). That would
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leave enough time for publishing that we probably wouldn't need any
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extra synchronization code.
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If that turns out to be too unintuitive for users, I could imagine doing
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it on SIGTERMs too, and just delaying exit until we had successfully
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published to at least one authority, at which point we'd hope that it
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propagated from there.
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Acknowledgements:
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tup suggested this idea.
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