7 ms·
Tor Exit Nodes Mapped and Located
- josephscott 14y agoInteresting map, zooming into Utah (where I live) shows that the local ISP Xmission is running 3 exit nodes. The map shows 4, but two of them have the same IP address.
- dgesang 14y ago15 exit nodes in the kyrgyz republic hospital area alone? Can that be correct?
- wfn 14y agoPerhaps simply multiple network interfaces / assigned IP addresses - all could actually reside in the same physical machine. (That's probably not good practice Tor-wise, of course - the nodes should be as dispersed as possible..) edit now that I think about it, placing Tor exits in a hospital area might be a clever tactic to avoid them being raided (e.g. to freeze memory and attempt to extract some data about other nodes etc)..
- anonymfus 14y agoAnd just by coincidence they are placed at the center of the capital.
- codesuela 14y agoThats just an error, if you check the IPs they all belong to EuroVPS who in turn seem to lease their lines from Leaseweb(Netherlands). Maybe Eurovps office used to be in Kyrgyzstan and the whois data was stale at the time this was mapped. (e.g. http://whois.domaintools.com/77.235.32.0 http://whois.domaintools.com/77.235.32.0) Same thing for the one in Almaty, Kazakhstan which is actually located in Belgium (http://whois.domaintools.com/89.106.244.21 http://whois.domaintools.com/89.106.244.21). Another example 46.37.160.114 maps to Vladivostok, but it actually belongs to BurstNET London.
- kl0nk 14y agoIP geolocalisation sucks badly. For example OVH got only 1 DC (well to be precise one big room) in Paris. Kimsufi are hosted in their DC in Roubaix (north of France). They also got another one located in the east (near Strasbourg). You can also buy an IP located in somewhere else in Europe but linked to your server in Roubaix.
- X-Istence 14y agoI'm with OVH, and I have various IP's with them. Some Geo-IP to the US, some Geo-IP to Canada ... always fun :-)
- wfn 14y agoJust as I thought, the Kimsufi line is really popular (at least for these kinds of things)! :)
- Wilya 14y agoAny background on who "Conformal Systems" are and why they would operate exit nodes ? I'm not really familiar with who they are and what they do, but they seem to be the only one in the top-25 that isn't either a hosting company or a residential ISP. (apart from Formless Networking, but that one is a bit more well known) Not that it's not nice of them, but it seems a bit out of place.
- EwanG 14y agoGovernment contractor. Feel free to guess what they're being paid to do...
- jazzyb 14y agoEverything I can find on them indicates that they are simply an open source company who takes privacy and data security very seriously [1] -- which would explain why they are running tor exit nodes. What information do you have that they are government contractors? [1] https://www.conformal.com/ https://www.conformal.com/
- jcr 14y agoCasting doubts and aspersions when you don't know anything and haven't bothered to read up on what they do is extremely unfair. They do some very impressive cryptographic deduplication. Essentially it's a method to deduplicate already encrypted data reliably. If you don't realize how amazingly cool that is, you need to do some reading. It's a really tough problem, and it solves a major pain point for anyone with large volumes of encrypted data (i.e. governments). EDIT: Links https://www.conformal.com/ https://www.conformal.com/ https://www.cyphertite.com/ https://www.cyphertite.com/
- JonnieCache 14y ago"cryptographic deduplication" How is that even possible? Surely a custom crypto scheme is needed?
- 14y ago
- bergie 14y agoInteresting, all the Berlin exit nodes are in a place that is a huge construction area on the Museum Island. Based on this I suppose they were only able to do city-level positioning (GeoIP or something similar).
- ffffruit 14y agoI agree. Majority of Central London ones are right in the middle of the financial district.
- koralatov 14y agoAnd Edinburgh's are smack-bang in the middle of Princes Street Gardens, which is staggeringly unlikely unless they're subterranean...
- tych0 14y agoIt's worth noting that the statistics may be skewed because e.g. of US-based operators run their nodes at foreign ISPs due to fear of US law enforcement. Countries with more "liberal" policies probably have more nodes because of this, but it doesn't necessarily mean there are more operators based in those countries.
- badgar 14y agoAh, I see the distinction you're making: this is a map of exit nodes, not exit node operators. The operators can of course be anywhere in the world. For all we know based on just this map, all the tor exit node operators live in Antarctica.
- hkmurakami 14y agoI'm curious: what are the specific laws that we should be concerned about? (Obviously the US has many draconian laws regarding cyber-anything, but I'm curious what specific lines we cross with Tor Exit Node operation. Does it include something like ownership and responsibility of the data that passes through a node that we operate?)
- nwh 14y agoThere's nothing new here. The exit nodes are public knowledge.
- liotier 14y agoSure, but public knowledge represented in a nice synthetic graphic way is more informative and more efficient at getting a point across.
- kjackson2012 14y agoOnly 3 exit Tor nodes in the Bay Area? I'm surprised, I would have expected a lot more.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- reycharles 14y agoI think it's interesting that the vast majority are in Europe. I would have expected more in Asia and South America.
- bifrost 14y agoIn case its not already obvious, most Geo-IP data is not particularly correct. In my experience its often off by 50-100 miles, and lucky if it even says the correct city. I've actually had Google say my IPs were in Singapore, when they were obviously not, and its a big pain to get Google to change that. Some of the other Geo-IP providers are better, but not by a whole lot in my experience. If its also not obvious, most large TOR exit nodes are in datacenters and not in people's houses, for a variety of reasons.
- D9u 14y agoI concur with your statements, as I've seen my own GeoIP resolve to someplace 3,000 miles away from my actual physical location. Bravo for the data center mention as well. As someone who lives in a rural area, without access to high-speed connections, the idea of running a home based server just doesn't make sense.
- jes5199 14y agoThat's an uncomfortably small number of exits, in my opinion.
- lukejduncan 14y agoI'm a strong advocate of the Tor project, but man would I ever be afraid to be an exit node
- mburns 14y agoIt is worth noting that you can run Tor in non-exit mode, but still route (secure, encrypted) tunnels around for other Tor users. This is (ideally) how every Tor user should act, if at all possible.
- traskjd 14y agoBeing pedantic, but if EVERYONE did that surely you'd never reach the actual internet right? :-)
- ufmace 14y agoI thought that Tor was hard-coded to always use 3 nodes between you and the internet, no matter how many there are in the system.
- scoot 14y agoYou are being pedantic, as it's pretty obvious that mburns meant TOR end-users, as distinct from those donating exit node bandwidth.
- mburns 14y agoFair point. :) To take your pedant to its extreme, though, using Tor Hidden Services entirely inside the Tor network is more secure than using a Tor exit node to access web sites outside of Tor. If you hear about sites like the Silk Road, those exist only inside the Tor network, you can't (directly) reach them the 'actual internet' / the Web.
- lukejduncan 14y agoTrue. In fact I personally do this. I really want to run an exit node, but I'm also terrified of having my apartment raided and turned upside down for traffic flowing out of my place.
- bcherry 14y agoTwo exit nodes near Washington DC. The NSA's headquarters are within the error tolerance of GeoIP. Coincidence?!
- snowwrestler 14y agoThe map puts them in Ashburn, VA, which makes sense as there are massive commercial data centers there. If you have a server or VPS whose location is "east," there's a good chance that it is in an Ashburn data center.
- chimeracoder 14y agoZooming in and clicking on the arrows: > IP: Location: Netblock: AS Name: ISP: Reverse DNS: 50.16.161.238 Ashburn, United States 50.16.0.0/16 AMAZON-AES AMAZON.COM INC. ec2-50-16-161-238.compute-1.amazonaws.com So, not a coincidence, but also not suspicious - it's just Amazon's data center.
- malandrew 14y agoIt's very sad that Europe has many times the number of exit nodes as the US has.