7 ms·
>This could cost less than $5000 for a month I ran a bunch of nodes for a couple years and that's optimistic by perhaps an order of magnitude. No $5 a month VP
by bragr 2y ago
>This could cost less than $5000 for a month
I ran a bunch of nodes for a couple years and that's optimistic by perhaps an order of magnitude. No $5 a month VPS provides enough bandwidth to sustain the monthly traffic of a Tor node, and nodes need to be continuously online and serving traffic for about 2-3 months[1] before they will be promoted to guard relays. Throttling traffic to stay in your bandwidth allocation will just get you marked as a slow node and limit the number of connections you get. Sustaining just 1 Mbps will blow your monthly transfer allocation on the cheap tiers of both Digital Ocean or Linode.
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/ https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoStill easily within the budget of the US, Russia, China, Israel, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of nodes are ran by intelligence agencies.
- darby_nine 2y agoIn fact, you should assume they are. This doesn't imply the network doesn't have utility for a given actor.
- bawolff 2y agoI think the threat model is that the majority are not run by cooperating malicious parties. Russia, china and usa all dont like each other much so are probably not sharing notes (in theory).
- aftbit 2y agoOr perhaps they _are_ sharing notes about tor users with each other, as part of a global club of intelligence agencies (a sort of new world order) who would rather not be overthrown. How are we to know?
- anticorporate 2y agoBecause if they each only have incomplete information, they each wouldn't know whether the information they have is relevant to preventing overthrow of their collective order, or intelligence that is only going to help their geopolitical adversary. Basically, a variation of the prisoner's dilemma. Also, those nukes we have pointed at each other are a pretty healthy hint.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y agothe last sentence really just gave me a chuckle
- jrochkind1 2y agoOr perhaps someone with secret quantum computing can break all our encryption and has full transparency on all communications on the internet. Perhaps extraterrestrials are eavesdropping on everything I say in my living room, and sharing it with the KGB. How are we to know?
- rrrix1 2y agoOccam's Razor definitely applies here. "The simplest explanation is usually the best one." Conspiracy theories are a logical reasoning black hole. I personally feel it's generally best to avoid the mental Spaghettification.
- andai 2y agoThey say the internet is just someone else's computer. With Tor it's the computer of a person who wants you to think it's not their computer, and also that they aren't paying attention to (or somehow can't see) what you're doing on it.
- chr_1 2y agoBefore 2020 when /r/privacy stimulated conversation that was worthy of good discussion you learned Tor the software made less available nodes accessible with newer deployments, that’s why it got faster. Regardless of how many nodes existed. The routing shifted. Now it’s way faster and there's specifically designated guard nodes seemingly pinged repeatedly out to the same allied nations.
- giantg2 2y agoThe interesting thing is, the more agencies that run relays, the more they interfere with each other. So having something like US, Russia, and China a each running 25% of the network reduces the chances of any one getting all three relays.
- droopyEyelids 2y agoThis would help negate that interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- giantg2 2y agoSpecifically what I chose US (allies implied), China, and Russia. These should be three competing factions.
- pasabagi 2y agoI think even Russia and the US still do intelligence sharing on a lot of stuff - and that's before you consider that the US seems to be in everybody's networks anyhow, so non-sharing is probably just sharing with a bit more skullduggery.
- giantg2 2y agoI don't think they share on the bulk data. I would highly doubt they routinely cooperate on cyber crimes given Russia's stance on the matter (basically encouraging it).
- trompetenaccoun 2y agoRussia and China are allies. And I'm not sure if Beijing would even be interested in spying on TOR users since it's blocked so thoroughly it's basically unusable for Chinese residents.
- giantg2 2y ago
- belorn 2y agoNow to add additional problems. 1000 tor nodes on a single platform would be very noticeable and geographically limited. Platforms also have different weight attached to them in the consensus, which adds further time requirements before a node is promoted. The developers do not want a single platform provider to be able to observe a large portion of all the traffic, so there are counter measures. The attacker could try to create a handful of accounts on hundreds of platforms in as many countries as possible, assuming one verify that the platforms accepts tor and do not share underlying providers and data centers. The cost would then be the average price of said providers, which is going to be a fair bit more than the cheapest providers out there. Managing and spreading them out is also going to cost a lot of man hours. Also the secops need to be fairly on the point and need to be maintained quite strictly across all the providers.
- qb1 2y agoPagers and the next day handheld radios exploded on their users! This can be done.
- aesh2Xa1 2y agoI think the news about that particular counter example is too recent to be easily understood. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/remotely-exploding-pagers.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/remotely-expl... Still, I think your point is excellent. The sort of group interested in tracking someone(s) over Tor certainly might have the capability to do so despite the difficulty.
- maicro 2y agoYeah, too recent to understand (though I've also been out of the loop a bit) - so thank you, that's...a good one.
- hiatus 2y ago> Let's say I as a private individual fund 1000 tor nodes Was the operation against Hezbollah funded by a private individual? Otherwise I'm not sure the relevance of your statement to the comment that started this thread.
- chatmasta 2y agoYou don’t technically need separate nodes, just separate IP addresses. Although Tor has some marginal protections against circuits sharing relays with similar IP, so you couldn’t just get a /24 and hope they all get the same circuit.
- Terretta 2y agoThis is what providers such as https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/ are for: https://www.vultr.com/features/datacenter-locations/ https://www.vultr.com/features/datacenter-locations/
- tga_d 2y agoNot only would you need the node to expose IPs with a wide enough distribution to allow the right path selection, you'd also need to have enough bandwidth available to look like distinct hosts, and ensure any losses in connectivity aren't correlated enough to draw attention (people monitor metrics.torproject.org pretty diligently, and would notice if there was a chunk of bandwidth coming and going in lockstep). At that point, the difference in cost to just actually running legitimately separate hosts is negligible. All empirical evidence points towards the status quo that has existed for most all of Tor's existence: if you want to identify Tor users, there are cheaper ways to do it than dominating the network (and those ways are expensive enough to be outside most people's threat models). That said, any bandwidth anyone wants to contribute to mitigate such attacks is always appreciated, even if it's more useful for performance reasons in practice. ;)
- alfiedotwtf 2y agoIf it’s that expensive to run Tor nodes, who is actually paying for them? I’ve heard individuals getting doors kicked in for participating in the network, so it’s not individuals. Corporates too wouldn’t want this type of burden… so is it really just spy-vs-spy
- 0points 2y ago> I’ve heard individuals getting doors kicked in for participating in the network, so it’s not individuals. It's individuals
- autoexec 2y agoUnless something has changed, one of the issues with Tor is that it tries to send traffic through servers that have the most bandwidth which are pretty much certain to be servers owned by the state a lot of the time because a random person's residential cable modem is going to be a lot less capable.
- input_sh 2y agoRun by individuals doesn't necessarily mean run on potato hardware. I ran a highly reputable (non-exit) node on a beefy but underutilised dedicated server for at least half a decade.
- p4bl0 2y agoMany individuals contribute to running relays. And there are non-profit organizations collecting donations to operates Tor exit nodes: - https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/ - https://nos-oignons.net/ https://nos-oignons.net/
- idiotsecant 2y agoThis is probably strictly true but it smacks to me of 'many people say'. I wonder what % of TOR nodes are run by people with an ideological allegiance for the network vs how many are run by nation-state actors.
- voldacar 2y agoI started a tor relay on a spare vps about a month ago and it got guard status around 2-3 weeks in, so that info seems to be out of date.
- arktos_ 2y agoPardon my ignorance, but I thought it fruitful to ask: Are there any issues that can arise by doing this on a VPS? I ask because I know of stories of law enforcement sending inquiries to owners of, say, exit nodes requiring certain information about given traffic. I don't know if this happens for middle-nodes (or whatever they're called). Moreover, are there any issues with associating a node to, you know, your name and billing information? I don't know much about this, and although I could look it up, I think that my questions - and your respective answers or those of others - might do some public service of information sharing here.
- voldacar 2y agoI'm not an exit node. You can buy a vps with xmr if you're worried about privacy from law enforcement.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y agomost vps don't support xmr though. any suggestions to whom I can trust (I basically only trust hetzner in vps space)
- voldacar 2y agohttps://monerica.com/ https://monerica.com/ ctrl-f for web hosting
- beeflet 2y agoSome do though. I got started a minecraft server the other month that i paid for in xmr. You can go to like a VPS aggregator like serverhunter.com and filter those that allow altcoins as payment https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=stock%3A%28in_stock+OR+unknown%29+payment_methods%3Aaltcoin https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=stock%3A%28in_stock+OR+u...
- ForHackernews 2y agoThese costs explain why most of the nodes are probably run by the FBI.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zorrn 2y agoWe also recently saw the xz backdoor wich was worked on for many years so I think it could be possible if you really have on target.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]