[baalimago]

Wouldn't the fact that several huge organizations all try to own as many nodes as possible make Tor safer? If more than one org try to gain the majority, everyones share will be lesser. I highly doubt that FSB and NSA are both agreeing that only one of them should be allowed to host a huge amount of nodes.

>The upside is that no government would admit to having this capability

Probably because it's very improbable that they have the capability to do so.

[wongarsu]

TOR isn't like bitcoin where you have to own N/2+1 nodes, you only have to see the traffic of the first and last node in each connection you care about. That means any one node can belong to more than one organization.

Suppose the NSA has a project to deanonymize TOR, so they set up TOR nodes. To be less conspicuous (TOR node ips are monitored for geographic distribution) they set up small clusters in various locations, one of them an apartment in Amsterdam. The FSB manages to get a double agent that installs software in those nodes to send the same information to Russia. India finds a 0-day exploit and installs their own data-extraction on those nodes as well. Since it's an undercover installation in Amsterdam usual US government rules don't apply and the ISP used uses Huawei networking equipment, giving China a way to listen in as well. Meanwhile the ISP itself is run by Mossad agents specifically to extract dutch traffic for Israeli analysis, and they struck gold with this NSA op choosing them because they are cheap and have no data cap. The ISP routes the traffic to the internet backbone, where most of it will pass through a GCHQ facility on the British coast.

That's 6 different agencies using the same pair of nodes to deanonymize TOR users, without any deliberate data sharing.