Tor in the Amazon cloud | Hacker News Reader

Tor in the Amazon cloud

cloud.torproject.org

69 pointsthere25 comments

If anyone is wondering about the risk related to running one of these tor cloud instances. The bridges are configured to only accept and relay traffic to and from other tor nodes. The exit policy is reject everything. These instances will never be the last hop of a tor circuit...

So, we'll have plenty of relays, all fundamentally under Amazon's control.

But exit nodes are a problem; how can we get people to run those?

Do you run an exit node? If not why?

Edit: You were probably asking about EC2 exit nodes. It's a little better than having it in my house, but at the end of the day, I would still be worried about landing in court over the traffic the node handles.

Nope, because I'm chicken. Also, I have crap bandwidth.

I would, but here in Germany I can be held responsible for any illegal acts that are commited through my connection ("Mitstörerhaftung"). I don't want to lose all my computers and face an expensive legal battle because someone posted some child porn through my node.

if tor users would stop running bittorrent through it, my two nodes would still be exits instead of relays. DMCA complaints can quickly take down an exit node in the US.

You realise you can offer an exit node for only certain ports? It's not perfect for what you want but its a start.

I run an exit node, but not on a US-based server given DMCA complaints becomes tiresome.

Single best thing you can do is run the "this is a tor exit router" (google for it) web page on port 80 of your TOR exit node --- that demonstrates you know what your rights are.

I've been running an exit node on EC2 for a few months and I've only received 1 DMCA notice and I responded that I was running a tor node and was not legally responsible for the traffic I was producing and it was resolved. Their EULA does not explicitly prevent you from doing this so if you don't mind dealing with the feigning bulldogs every once in a while it's not that bad.

Could you be more specific? Did anyone from Amazon have to intervene? Or was it enough to show the EULA?

Amazon sent the DMCA on behalf of the copyright owners, I responded with the EULA and a up front response about what I was using my image for, saying if I was in violation I would terminate my image immediately. They said thanks for explaining the situation and I haven't heard anything since then.

I always thought that "not legally responsible for traffic" was the best guess at the legal theory. Is there now actual precedence supporting your statement?

I wrote a tutorial back in June on how to setup an ec2 exit-node for the Tor Challenge (https://www.eff.org/torchallenge). It also includes an automatic shutoff when you've reached the data limit of the free usage tier. I've only received one DMCA in the past 6 months I've had it running.

http://bryogenic.com/eff-tor-challenge-amazon-ec2-free-usage...

Edit: After reading through the site it looks like they basically did the same thing I did but created an AMI that you can just 'clone'. Either way, good for the Tor community.

If a large enough group of tor servers resides on Amazon's network what is going to keep Amazon (or the government) from being able to reverse the anonymization? Isn't this exactly why Tor asks people hosting multiple machines to label them as in the same "family" to prevent them from directly communicating?

1. The US government can discover the user, but won't know what the user is doing, unless the user('s client) also chooses US exit nodes reliably / recurrently enough that a successful timing attack or somesuch can be mounted.

2. Presumably, the people who need bridges the most are in countries where Tor relays are censored (China, Iran, the Seychelles?, Cameroon?), and Amazon isn't in those jurisdictions, nor would the US government want to deanonymize them.

But yeah, if you're in the United States and have something to hide from your government, don't use Amazon Tor bridges.

The Seychelles? I did not realize there is a big human rights problem in the seychelles. A quick scan of the wikipedia page seems to indicate that the seychelles government ranked second for human rights in african countries.

What's going on in the seychelles?

http://www.seychellesweekly.com/May%209,%202011/top31_seyche... More island politics then human rights, not to belittle the issues.

That's a clever use of the free tier of EC2. I wonder how long it will be before someone on 4chan makes a DDOS AMI.

A cloud DDOS would not scale that well. Even if amazon did not shut down instances because of ToS violations how many free accounts do you think could be created? Compare that with the ease of renting botnets...

Awesome idea.

I spent 5 hours at a Tor hackfest once, and was extremely impressed by both the pragmatism and creativity of those folks.

This is just one more elegant dent in the right direction. Their "Tor Browser" project is another nice one.

Amazon cloud is not the only cloud service out there, I think spreading the bridges over multiple company's/countries that have similar products would make it more sustainable.

This is truly amazing.

With Amazon kicking out Wikileaks out of EC2, how are they going to like Tor?

Why is amazon going to care about computers relaying traffic back and forth? As I already posted the nodes are configured as relay nodes only no exit traffic.

But more importantly why do you assume that amazon will think tor is bad and/or why do you assume tor is bad?

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