[tor-relays] Out-of-Memory-Attack & DoS from Tor-Client

Hi there,

i just want to report two partially successfull DoS Attacks on my Relay:

First attack:

Occured yesterday. The tor process showed massive traffic, much more my upload ( 45 Mbits) could handle.

I don’t know how in detail this worked, but I had receiving traffic at about 40Mbits and the relay tried to send about 100Mbits towards WAN.

Because I didn’t know if this was harmful traffic for the tor network, I finally pulled the plug and obtained a new IP after about 4 hours into the attack.

I had the feeling that a short time, there was still unusual sending/recieving ratio, but all related to tor.exe and it stabilized soon after.

My Guess ist hat a malformed packet was sent by tor, resulting in uncontrolled, unknown traffic to the WAN-Side.

The Realy had 3 DDoS Circuits killed, rejected circuits and introduce 2 at unnormal high rate, also like 117 marked addresses. It sent about 250GB more then it recieved.

The attack is also clearly visible in Tor Metrics, a massive spike in written Bytes can be seen.

Fingerprint: 8AFE4E6F05234B0184327C052B09F10191EAFAF3

Second Attack (today):

Today at about 2 p.m., the memory of the relay spiked to maximum (8GB) and additionally 22GB of virtual memory was used.

This caused the process to die, with an out-of-memory Error.

This also must came from a malformed packet in tor.

Is there any known method to circumvent both of these Issues?

In the first event, i don’t know if the error could have cleared self after some more hours.

Regarding the memory issue, i think this must be resolved in the tor software itself, allthough I thought about adding 64GB of RAM and 256GB Page-File, just to see if it makes any difference in case of attacks.

But I don’t think so.

Best regards,

Joker

Chris Enkidu-6 wrote:

Try this:

GitHub - Enkidu-6/tor-ddos: Tor DDoS Protection - iptables rules for Tor relay operators to mitigate DDoS

It should greatly reduce if not eliminate it.

What does that help on Windows? You overlooked that
he wrote:
   "but all related to tor.exe and it stabilized soon after."

An .EXE indicates Windows to me.

···

--
--gv
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My apologies. It seems that I missed that part.

···

On 12/3/2025 8:56 AM, Marco Moock via tor-relays wrote:

Am 03.12.2025 um 13:16:52 Uhr schrieb Gisle Vanem via tor-relays:

Chris Enkidu-6 wrote:

Try this:

[https://github.com/Enkidu-6/tor-ddos](https://github.com/Enkidu-6/tor-ddos)

It should greatly reduce if not eliminate it.  

What does that help on Windows? You overlooked that
he wrote:
   "but all related to tor.exe and it stabilized soon after."

An .EXE indicates Windows to me.

His relay seems to be running on Windows.

Although, it should be possible to write a script that implements
firewall rulesets in Windows too, maybe Powershell supports that.

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