From the course: Exploring Tor and the Dark Web

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Directory servers

Directory servers - Tor Browser Tutorial

From the course: Exploring Tor and the Dark Web

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Directory servers

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- [Narrator] Directory authorities play a crucial role in the Tor Network. They serve as the central location for storing the identity of the nodes on the Tor Network. The identities of these directory authorities are hard-coded into the Tor browser, and there are only a small handful of them around the world. Here's the current list of all Tor Directory authorities that were live when I filmed this course. As you can see, they're distributed around the world and have varying levels of bandwidth available to support Tor operations. The sole purpose of directory authorities is to maintain information on the status of each node on the Tor network. They track when nodes appear and disappear, helping ensure that the network adds new nodes promptly and quickly drops unhealthy nodes from the network. This work is vital to maintaining the stability of the Tor network. As an unhealthy node can quickly disrupt communications for a large number of users. When you open the Tor browser, the first…

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