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Is there anyone that still believes TOR will protect him from state actors? It's nice that people still run exit nodes, but it's so expensive and dangerous tha

Is there anyone that still believes TOR will protect him from state actors? It's nice that people still run exit nodes, but it's so expensive and dangerous that you cannot expect a satisfactory number of nodes to be run for moral reasons and not for monetary/surveillance ones. Also since most of the nodes are run on VM instances, a few companies could potentially recover all the routing and keys from the servers RAM if they feel like it. They're not going to do it for the average joe, but things like the Patriot act and it's European equivalents make sure intelligence agencies can do it if they want.

Santosh83 8y ago
I'm just throwing an idea out here. It is often stated that running Tor exit nodes is both costly and dangerous. For understandable reasons. Yet the network needs more such nodes, to defeat the scenario of one powerful entity operating hundreds of exit nodes. It would be nice if even ordinary Tor users can run transient exit nodes. Now as it stands, nobody will do it. So why not change the functionality of Tor such that it becomes possible for a user to operate an exit node for a whitelisted list of sites (either based on IP or domain names) that they are willing to funnel traffic for? It's still better than giving up and letting a majority of exit nodes be controlled by state actors and other powerful entities right? Serving traffic only for a set of white-listed endpoints can considerably reduce the risk of running afoul of local law enforcement. I realise this effectively cripples Tor, but normal "uncensored" exit nodes can still operate, by those willing to run them.
- zingmars 8y ago
  I've seen this idea thrown around in Tor mailing lists as well. The developers basically replied that while they're not happy about how Tor is used by some people, if they started censoring some things, they would eventually be required to censor others. At that point, what is really the point of Tor - just chain some VPNs together.
  - Santosh83 8y ago
    The point would be the stronger anonymity offered by Tor, whereas with VPNs, you're basically at the mercy of the service providers not to keep logs. Also the developers needn't censor anything but merely build in a mechanism that individual node operators can use or not as they see fit. Like adblock lists, the lists themselves would presumably be made and circulated by interested individuals, and nothing to do with Tor devs. Anyway, thinking further, I realised even a whitelist can be bypassed in various ways to do illegal stuff, so you'd still need to be quite prepared and legally informed before running an Exit node. :-(
vbezhenar 8y ago
You need all nodes in the path, not just exit nodes, to identify source. And traffic already HTTPSed, so controlling exit node won't help. So far I've never heard of state actors beating TOR. They usually exploit things like TOR browser vulnerabilities, etc. TOR was developed to protect american spies, so it's exactly its purpose: to defend against state actors.
- gruez 8y ago
  no. if you control the entry and exit nodes, you can identify the source using traffic correlation analysis
belorn 8y ago
Yes I believe that TOR will protect against state actors in the very similar way that leaks and investigative journalism protect against corruption and abuse. It increase costs where its too costly for the average case and for the super important and critical cases then the cheaper and more available methods are likely to bring results way before such costly attacks are even considered. For example, if they want to know who owns a specific tor hidden service they could get the lawyers and higher ups to pressure amazon and microsoft to dump rams of all their customers (and manage all the secrecy so to not create bad PR), or they could just make a search on their vulnerability database and attack the website directly. They can also just put a well trained and experienced detective to find traces from the operators that they might accidentally make on facebook, stackoverflow and so on. They can have an agent go under cover or try recruit people close to the target. Each of those have costs and risk that is far cheaper than attacking the tor network, and having read a lot of stories in regard to the silk road, wikileaks and other users of tor it seems that this is indeed the primary way state actors operates.

Santosh83 8y ago

I'm just throwing an idea out here. It is often stated that running Tor exit nodes is both costly and dangerous. For understandable reasons. Yet the network needs more such nodes, to defeat the scenario of one powerful entity operating hundreds of exit nodes. It would be nice if even ordinary Tor users can run transient exit nodes. Now as it stands, nobody will do it. So why not change the functionality of Tor such that it becomes possible for a user to operate an exit node for a whitelisted list of sites (either based on IP or domain names) that they are willing to funnel traffic for? It's still better than giving up and letting a majority of exit nodes be controlled by state actors and other powerful entities right? Serving traffic only for a set of white-listed endpoints can considerably reduce the risk of running afoul of local law enforcement. I realise this effectively cripples Tor, but normal "uncensored" exit nodes can still operate, by those willing to run them.

zingmars 8y ago
I've seen this idea thrown around in Tor mailing lists as well. The developers basically replied that while they're not happy about how Tor is used by some people, if they started censoring some things, they would eventually be required to censor others. At that point, what is really the point of Tor - just chain some VPNs together.
- Santosh83 8y ago
  The point would be the stronger anonymity offered by Tor, whereas with VPNs, you're basically at the mercy of the service providers not to keep logs. Also the developers needn't censor anything but merely build in a mechanism that individual node operators can use or not as they see fit. Like adblock lists, the lists themselves would presumably be made and circulated by interested individuals, and nothing to do with Tor devs. Anyway, thinking further, I realised even a whitelist can be bypassed in various ways to do illegal stuff, so you'd still need to be quite prepared and legally informed before running an Exit node. :-(

vbezhenar 8y ago

You need all nodes in the path, not just exit nodes, to identify source. And traffic already HTTPSed, so controlling exit node won't help. So far I've never heard of state actors beating TOR. They usually exploit things like TOR browser vulnerabilities, etc. TOR was developed to protect american spies, so it's exactly its purpose: to defend against state actors.

gruez 8y ago
no. if you control the entry and exit nodes, you can identify the source using traffic correlation analysis

belorn 8y ago

Yes I believe that TOR will protect against state actors in the very similar way that leaks and investigative journalism protect against corruption and abuse. It increase costs where its too costly for the average case and for the super important and critical cases then the cheaper and more available methods are likely to bring results way before such costly attacks are even considered. For example, if they want to know who owns a specific tor hidden service they could get the lawyers and higher ups to pressure amazon and microsoft to dump rams of all their customers (and manage all the secrecy so to not create bad PR), or they could just make a search on their vulnerability database and attack the website directly. They can also just put a well trained and experienced detective to find traces from the operators that they might accidentally make on facebook, stackoverflow and so on. They can have an agent go under cover or try recruit people close to the target. Each of those have costs and risk that is far cheaper than attacking the tor network, and having read a lot of stories in regard to the silk road, wikileaks and other users of tor it seems that this is indeed the primary way state actors operates.