[Pkg-privacy-maintainers] Bug#948975: vanguards is for Tor clients too; vanguards is not only for Tor onion services

[Patrick Schleizer]

> This is a deliberate choice that we have made, as there is no reason
to use vanguards unless onion services are being hosted.


I believe this is wrong.

source: https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-vanguards-add-onion-services

Quote:

(Underline is mine.)

"The add-on uses our Control Port Protocol and the corresponding Stem
Library to defend against these attacks. The hope is that it will we
will be able to study the performance and functionality of this feature
and gather feedback before we deploy these changes in Tor for all onion
services _and clients_."

"We believe that the most serious threat that v3 onion services
currently face is guard discovery. A guard discovery attack enables an
adversary to determine the guard node(s) that are in use _by a Tor
client and/or_ Tor onion service. Once the guard node is known, traffic
analysis attacks that can deanonymize an onion service (or onion service
user) become easier."


> If vanguards gets installed accidentally then it can have confusing
effects for users. It is better to explicitly enable it.


Isn't it Debian policy (or only convention?) to autostart any service
provided by most "normal" packages (such as apache2)?

That policy / convention could be questioned as a whole but is it
appropriate to make an exception here?

How would vanguards be installed accidentally?

The only other change vanguards would require to make it work out of the
box after installation in Debian is this one:

https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/issues/47

https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/pull/54

Kind regards,
Patrick