pointless zero hop ip harvesting

[cumlord]

it's come up a couple times about using zero hops for torrents and i think most people know this is a bad idea, but when playing around with my unregistered b32 scanner thing i tried to do this as part of the scanner and found a pretty simple way to do it for harvesting ip's that are doing that. i'm assuming (hoping) nearly nobody is actually using zero hops without a good reason, but we did find that exposed router console pretty quickly so it wouldn't surprise me

to do it, do a lookup on the destination, then wait at least 10 minutes and try again. you care about the inbound gateways (router infos) listed on the leaseset. normally these are the routers on the outermost end of the tunnel (speaking farthest from the originating peer) that your outbound gateway talks to. if the tunnel is using any amount of hops like it should, the gateways change every 10 minutes. if they stay the same, it's a zero hop tunnel.

stormycloud uses zero hops in his outproxy, since the org isn't anonymous and this lets you use more multihomes for high traffic. getting the router info for the gateway will reveal that it's a stormycloud family router.

although, this method doesn't exactly work as easily when the destination is multihomed like stormycloud. since he has several routers the gateway will cycle through these. you could watch a target destination for a while and see if it only switches between a certain number of routers maybe.

so, for scripting you do a lookup on the target destination, have it save the router infos, and do it again in 10 minutes. this will send a lookup request to floodfills though, so might be best to target destinations of interest instead of all of them. if they're the same it's zero hop, then you get the router info of that gateway and harvest the ip address from that.

[lgillis]

Oh my goodness. After all these years, someone has taken the trouble to put theory into practice. (The I2P instructions are not read or understood. When I paint pictures like this, there's often not enough imagination to think a hop out of a 1-hop tunnel. And that’s why I’m pretty sure that your assumption, that most people know what they’re doing, is untenable. It was not without reason that I always wrote that a 0-hop setting would be conceivable if someone wanted to distribute their own works. From that point of view, of course, your idea of good and bad configuration is correct.) Now I can finally retire with a clear conscience.