Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: RunningLion on April 05, 2012, 07:42 pm

Title: bridge
Post by: RunningLion on April 05, 2012, 07:42 pm
Why isn't using a bridge unsafe?  Aren't you forwarding information to someone before it is encrypted in the network?
Title: Re: bridge
Post by: CaptainSensible on April 05, 2012, 09:12 pm
A bridge is merely a first-hop Tor relay.  It's your entry point to the Tor network.  It differs from regular Tor relays in that bridge addresses are not published; that way, people in countries were censorship is rampant can use a bridge address as their way to connect to the Tor network.  Since the address of Tor relays is known and published by the Tor Project, countries that want to block access to the Tor network can add this list of Tor relays to their list of forbidden web addresses. 

You data to that bridge is encrypted.  And if you want to be extra safe you can either run your own bridge (it's not at all hard to do) or create a bridge in the Tor Cloud project.  (see hxxps://cloud.torproject.org/)  Then connect to your bridge and know that you're (hopefully) a little bit safer because you control that first connection to the Tor network.
Title: Re: bridge
Post by: mdmamail on April 06, 2012, 12:50 am
If using a live CD whenever you reboot you end up grabbing a of entry/guard nodes every time which could give away the fact you are using a Tor live CD should your ISP records be examined, or worse should your ISP be required to report Tor users sometime in the future to unscrupulous LE. A bridge prevents this from happening

There are many other ways, like SSH into your private VPS and use Tor from there, rent a Tor proxy, or use obfsproxy + Tor and a bridge, then nobody knows what you're doing.