Beware Peerguardian , PeerBlock , etc. users , do not rely on anonymity using Tor while on Peerblock Client or else.
On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 03:31:50PM +0200,
Nexus23 Labs. wrote:
Hi ,
I’m Karl from Nexus23 Labs .
We make research on ip ranges which we wouldn’t connect to ,
I think you heard of peerblock or ipfilter feature in many p2p clients ,
so I’m asking you if you and your team could make available this feature for tor clients ,
the possibility to import such an ipfilter.dat or txt so to have ability to ban any of the ip ranges listed in it .
The Answer :
A) Your tool would not be able to ban the “use” of variousTor nodes in the circuit just by looking at outgoing connections
to the first hop, since the Tor client tunnels into connections from the first hop to the further hops.
So if you want to make statements like “don’t use Germany in the circuit”, a tool that monitors the client’s network won’t be able to do that.
But more importantly,
B) Tor’s anonymity comes from having users blending together by making choices over the same set of data using the same weights.
If a given Tor user started choosing paths differently, he would stand out,and actually get *worse* anonymity.
This particular field of path selection is not well-understood and full of pitfalls that might be extremely bad.
So I would worry that if you provided a feature like this for your users,
it would end up harming them in unpredictable ways.
Hope that helps,
Roger Dingledine
Note :
Obviously you can still load ipfilterX into P2P Clients while on TOR ,
that’s why the two things do use different net protocols .