Vanguards is the reference implementation of proposal 247 defenses against guard-discovery attacks on long-lived hidden services. It rotates layer-2 and layer-3 guards on schedules that defeat the standard adversarial-relay correlation attacks. AnubizHost provides VPS with Vanguards preinstalled and configured for long-running onion deployments.
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Guard-discovery attacks work by colluding adversarial relays inferring the location of a hidden service's entry guards from circuit-construction patterns. Once the guards are known, the adversary can compromise or coerce them, dramatically reducing the anonymity of the hidden service.
Vanguards mitigates this by inserting additional rotation layers between the entry guard and the rendezvous circuit, making the guard much harder to fingerprint from external observation.
Vanguards runs as a daemon that consumes the Tor control port and adjusts circuit-construction parameters. torrc needs ControlPort 9051 and CookieAuthentication 1. We configure both by default on Vanguards-tagged VPS.
Long-lived high-value onions: yes. Hobbyist onions or short-lived testing onions: not necessary. The overhead of Vanguards is minimal but the defense is most valuable for services expected to live for years and attract sophisticated adversaries.
BTC and XMR. Vanguards is included at no additional cost on tagged tiers.
Related: v3 onion Iceland, v3 onion Romania, SecureDrop Iceland, Tor hosting parent, vanity generation.
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