And opens the network to abuses Tor was meant to protect against. If proof-of-destination is built into the network then that is a huge step towards invalidating the main benefit of using a VPN -- you don't want someone (your local authority) knowing where you've been. Current VPNs sort-of work by not being in your local jurisdiction. Decentralizing it makes it easier to attack.
You have proof that someone visited a specific site because it uses a value derived from that site's SSL cert. You just don't have any more knowledge than that.
> Note that such a proof is not straightforward. We firstly
prove that a ciphertext, CS N I , is the result of an encryption
without disclosing the public key nor the plaintext. This
causes the highest overhead in our construction. We use
the construction presented in [7] for this purpose.
> Then we
need to link the public key encrypted in clause two, with
the one used in clause one. For this we use a proof that two
commitments hide the same secret [5].
> Finally the third clause
can be openly computed by A given that it received the public
key from R.
> Using this, S can convince A that the tunnel created is to
a domain that the latter considers valid, without disclosing
which one.
Tor is funded by the US government, probably as a way of disseminating US propaganda during government overthrows. When conducting psyops, governments sometimes block the online channels the US uses. With them also controlling so many nodes, they can use Tor for surveillance.
Tor is funded by the us government. Why is very unclear. They may have backdoored it. They may be using it for surveillance. They are probably not using it to disseminate propaganda (they can do that over traditional channels). However, the likeliest reason (imo) for funding tor is simply that they need it themselves. There's a famous--and possibly apocryphal--anecdote from a security researcher who met an FBI agent at defcon. The security researcher brought up tor, and the FBI agent said 'oh, yeah, we have our own anonymity network like that--except it's just for the FBI'. The security researcher was unable to explain to the FBI agent why that made no sense.
It was revealed the FBI poses as Russians when doing their digital operations; maybe that's what they meant.
Tor absolutely spreads US propaganda. The "clear net" does too. The utility of Tor is that it prevents that clear net propaganda from being firewalled.
In the case of Hong Kong, we know who funds the terrorists. They meet with them in person and have been photographed, and the US makes no secret of how much they spend on terrorism in Hong Kong. But I still wonder how guides and instructions are given to the right people. Having read many CIA documents written to terrorist groups, I do wonder how they send these to HK terror leaders in the digital age. Tor is a candidate. Number stations, I kinda doubt.
This allows edit nodes to decide what types of content will be routed to their node.