Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dimator 2446 days ago
The whitelist based approach seems pretty limiting, doesn't it? If every exit node is expected to enumerate the domains it will carry traffic to, what happens if a client needs to connect to a new site? Are exit nodes intended to keep massive, curated whitelists?

Something isn't adding up, to me. If the assumption is that all "good" sites _can_ be enumerated, then wouldn't Tor (or other systems) exit nodes already be capable of blocking CP?

Someone connect the dots for me....

2 comments

The CP, Drug markets etc on Tor is typically on hidden services, not on the clearweb.

The whitelist approach may work similarly to adblocker lists, where you say "I trust Jim's List Of Friendly Websites". I don't know how good it is for performance though.

Obviously you can do a block for *.onion. But suppose someone searches up "how to make a [insert bad thing]" or something else inappropriate on something as simple as Google. It'd be somewhat hard to block all urls from Google or DDG that contain some text (not to mention that I've heard that people who are in this business use acronyms or other slang... which to the general user (like me) probably won't know.

Don't want to take that risk.

I believe the blocking is done on a domain/host level, so you'd block google.com in that case. That's likely not required, because google.com is generally thought to be okay, but you are correct that even that may be problematic. If your IP has searched for "$governmentBuilding blueprints" and there's a bomb planted at that building a week later, you could become a person of interest (provided that Google saves the ip for queries).

Blocking *.onion on the other hand wouldn't be necessary from a "legal protection" standpoint: hidden services don't see the original IP of the client.

Google knows IPs are shared and track on L7, they know Tor, NAT, CGNAT. So I'd wager if you share access to Google via Tor you'd get issues with Google quite quickly if not logged in and easily L7 traceable, in form of captchas and blocks everywhere.
TOR exit nodes can modify some data to clearnet sites, including blocking

They can't do this to onion services