Filename: xxx-bridges.txt
Title: Behavior for bridge users, bridge relays, and bridge authorities
Version: $Revision: 12051 $
Last-Modified: $Date: 2007-10-19 14:56:24 -0400 (Fri, 19 Oct 2007) $
Author: Roger Dingledine
Created: xx-Oct-2007
Status: Open

0. Preface:

  This document describes the design decisions around support for bridge
  users, bridge relays, and bridge authorities.

  For more details on what all of these mean, look at blocking.tex in
  /doc/design-paper/

1. Bridge relays.

  Bridge relays are just like normal Tor relays except they don't publish
  their server descriptors to the main directory authorities.

1.1. PublishServerDescriptor

  To configure your relay to be a bridge relay, just add
    PublishServerDescriptor bridge
  to your torrc. This will cause your relay to publish its descriptor
  to all the bridge authorities rather than the default authorities.

  Alternatively, you can say
    PublishServerDescriptor 0
  which will cause your relay to not publish anywhere. This could be
  useful for private bridges.

1.2. Defining DirPort

  Bridges need to answer BEGIN_DIR requests, both so they can answer
  /server/authority questions ("what's your descriptor?") and so they
  can supply their bridge users with cached copies of all the various
  Tor network information.

  Right now (0.2.0.9-alpha) we require that bridges turn their DirPort on
  -- which means both that we answer BEGIN_DIR requests and that we fetch
  and cache directory information in an aggressive way like other servers.

  But:
  a) we don't enforce that DirPort is on, since it's not clear how to
  detect if the user meant to be a bridge. So it's easy to launch a bridge
  relay that silently refuses BEGIN_DIR requests and is thus useless.
  b) We don't actually care if they have an open or reachable DirPort. So
  at some point we should separate having an open DirPort from answering
  directory questions. Which leads to:
  c) We need to investigate if there are any anonymity worries with
  answering BEGIN_DIR requests when our DirPort is off. If there aren't,
  we can drop the DirPort requirement.

1.3. Exit policy

  Bridge relays should use an exit policy of "reject *:*". This is
  because they only need to relay traffic between the bridge users
  and the rest of the Tor network, so there's no need to let people
  exit directly from them.

1.4. RelayBandwidthRate / RelayBandwidthBurst

  We invented the RelayBandwidth* options for this situation: Tor clients
  who want to allow relaying too. See proposal 111 for details. Relay
  operators should feel free to rate-limit their relayed traffic.

1.5. Helping the user with port forwarding, NAT, etc.

  Just as for operating normal relays, our documentation and hints for
  how to make your ORPort reachable are inadequate for normal users.

  We need to work harder on this step.

1.6. Vidalia integration

  Vidalia has turned into "Relay" settings page into a tri-state
  "Don't relay" "Relay for the Tor network" "Help censored users".

  If the click the third choice, it forces your exit policy to reject *:*,
  and it forces your DirPort to 9030 (see Sec 1.2 above about DirPort).

  If all the bridges end up on port 9001, that's not so good. On the
  other hand, putting the bridges on a low-numbered port in the Unix
  world requires jumping through extra hoops. The current compromise is
  that Vidalia makes the ORPort default to 443 on Windows, and 9001 on
  other platforms.

2. Bridge authorities.

  Bridge authorities are like normal directory authorities, except they
  don't create their own network-status documents. So if you ask an
  authority for a network-status document, they behave like a directory
  mirror: they give you one from one of the main authorities. But if
  you ask the bridge authority for a particular identity fingerprint,
  it will happily give you the latest descriptor for that fingerprint.

  Right now there's one bridge authority, running on the Tonga relay.

2.1. Exporting bridge-purpose descriptors

  We've added a new purpose for server descriptors, the "bridge"
  purpose. With the new router-descriptors file that includes annotations,
  it's easy to look through it and find the bridge-purpose descriptors.

  We should work with Tonga to export its router-descriptors file to
  some place where we can distribute the bridge addresses according to
  the policies in blocking.pdf. It might even be easier to have it write
  out a separate file, just for export, that includes only the bridge
  descriptors; or maybe a six-liner perl postprocessing script is the
  better plan there to create a file for export.

2.2. Reachability/uptime testing

  should bridge relays publish anonymously to the bridge authority?

  migrating to multiple bridge authorities

3. Bridge users.

    UseBridges 1
    TunnelDirConns 1

  Format of the bridge identifier.

  bridges as entry guards

  bridges as directory guards

    UpdateBridgesFromAuthority 1

  when to use a one-hop circuit, when to use a three-hop, to reach
  the directory authority

  bridge descriptor retry schedule

  when to make TunnelDirConns default.

  Vidalia integration:

    vidalia looks up the geoip data for tor servers it knows about. which
    is fine, except when they're bridges. now geoip.vidalia-project.net
    is a place to go to learn bridge IP addresses.