Tor in the Amazon cloud

https://cloud.torproject.org/

by there • 15 years ago

69 25 15 years ago

cloud.torproject.org

dfc6• 15 years ago

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...

lallysingh2• 15 years ago

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?

dfc6• 15 years ago

Do you run an exit node? If not why?

there• 15 years ago

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.

dotBen• 15 years ago

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.

bryogenic3• 15 years ago

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.

farsmith• 15 years ago

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

dfc6• 15 years ago

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?

MarkSweep• 15 years ago

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.

dfc6• 15 years ago

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...

bryogenic3• 15 years ago

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.

inconditus• 15 years ago

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

dfc6• 15 years ago

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?

feralchimp• 15 years ago

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.

joejohnson• 15 years ago

This is truly amazing.

tedivm• 15 years ago

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?

fl3tch• 15 years ago

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.

dfc6• 15 years ago

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?

wyck2• 15 years ago

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.

Tor in the Amazon cloud

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