Unredacted, a new Tor relay operator

Unredacted is a new and special project of Universal Layer, a privacy conscious hosting provider. We’re focused on running resilient, automated and security focused infrastructure. We’re dedicated to giving back to the community through open source and privacy focused projects. We back projects such as XMPP.is, a free and open XMPP/Jabber server and other projects under the Crypto World label.

We’ve maintained and operated Tor relays in the past, however, never under our own network. As an ARIN member, recently expanding our IP space we registered an ASN, AS399532. Putting it to good use, we established a BGP session with BuyVM who provides our bandwidth and connectivity. We love stability, so inbound traffic to our network is DDoS protected by Path.

We have 3 locations in which we operate Tor relays:

  • Las Vegas, NV
  • New York, NY
  • Roost, LU

All of which can be seen on our status page.

As a start, we currently run 6 Tor exit relays and plan to add more: metrics.torproject.org

  • Our relays are named after whistleblowers, activists and people who uphold the values that we hold dear to our hearts.
  • For the configuration management of these Tor relays, we use Ansible, which makes it extremely flexible and easy to maintain a consistent configuration across all of our relays.
  • Along with a collection of our own custom Ansible roles and playbooks, we use a fantastic role called ansible-relayor which allows for easy config management and offline keys for our relays.
  • For monitoring we use UptimeRobot, Prometheus and AlertManager, all of which give us different levels of metrics and insight into performance and network latency.

We hope that you enjoy our project! We’re proud to provide netizens of the world with stable and fast access to and from the Tor network through our relays.

Til next time 🙂

Z