[system33-]

It’s then best we’ve got for achieving actually meaningful privacy and anonymity. It has a huge body of research behind it that is regularly ignored by those coming up with sexy or off-the-cuff alternatives.

It’s the most popular so it gets the most attention: from academics, criminals, law enforcement, journalists, …

[beeflet]

Why not just have greater number of relays by default? Internet bandwidth tends to increase over time, and the odds of this correlation attack are roughly proportional to the attacker's share of relays to the power of the number of relays used.

So latency issues permitting, you would expect the default number of relays to increase over time to accommodate increases in attacker sophistication. I don't think many would mind waiting for a page to load for a minute if it increased privacy by 100x or 1000x.

[system33-]

If you’re advocating for a bigger network… we need more relay operators. Can’t wave a magic wand. There’s like 8000 relays. Haven’t looked in a while.

Or if you were arguing for increasing the number of relays in a circuit, that doesn’t increase security. It’s like one of the OG tor research papers deciding on 3. Bad guy just needs the first and the last. Middle irrelevant.

[Edman274]

> we need more relay operators. Can’t wave a magic wand. There’s like 8000 relays. Haven’t looked in a while.

The reason that there are so few relays and exit nodes is that everyone that runs an exit node believes, for very good reason, that they'll be opening themselves up to subpoenas and arrest for operating one. You know who never has to worry about getting arrested? Surveillance agencies tasked with running exit nodes.

Consider the two classes of relay and exit operators:

1. People who operate relays and exit nodes long term, spending money to do so with no possibility or expectation of receiving money in return, and opening themselves up to legal liability for doing so, whose only tangible benefit comes from the gratification of contributing to an anonymous online network

2. Government agencies who operate relays and exit nodes long term, spending government allocated money to operate servers, with no material risk to the agencies and whose tangible benefit comes from deanonymizing anonymous users. Crucially, the agencies are specifically tasked with deanonymizing these users.

Now, I guess the question is whether or not you think the people in group 1 have more members and more material resources than the agencies in group 2. Do you believe that there are more people willing to spend money to run the risk of having equipment seized and arrest for no gain other than philosophical gratification than there are government computers running cost and risk free, deanonymizing traffic (which is their job to do)?

[beeflet]

>Or if you were arguing for increasing the number of relays in a circuit, that doesn’t increase security. It’s like one of the OG tor research papers deciding on 3. Bad guy just needs the first and the last. Middle irrelevant.

Because of timing attacks? There are ways to mitigate timing attacks if you are patient (but I think clearnet webservers are not very patient and my drop your connection)

[system33-]

Yes timing attacks.

And yeah mitigation gets you into a huge body of research that’s inconclusive on practical usability. Eg so much overhead that it’s too slow and 10 people can use a 1000 relay network and still get just 1 Mbps goodput each. Contrived example.

People need to actually be able to use the network, and the more people the better for the individual.

There’s minor things tor does, but more should somehow be done. Somehow…

[meowfly]

Any idea what consideration keeps the tor team from making the client also act as a relay node by default?

[system33-]

Clients aren’t necessarily good relays. Reachability. Bandwidth. Uptime. I’ll-go-to-prison-if-caught-and-idk-how-to-change-settings-this-needs-to-just-work.

[basedrum]

it was used by Snowden to leak documents...

[AyyEye]

Snowden got caught.

[yupyupyups]

>It’s then best we’ve got for achieving actually meaningful privacy and anonymity

...while being practical.

One could argue that there is i2p. But i2p is slow, a little bit harder to use, and from what I can remember, doesn't allow you to easily browse the clearnet (regular websites).

[appendix-rock]

These sort of “Tor evangelism” comments are so tiring, frankly. There are quite a few like it in this thread, in response to…not people poo-pooing Tor, or throwing the baby out with the bathwater, rather making quite level-headed and reasonable claims as to the shortcomings and limitations of the network / protocol / service / whatever.

One should be able to make these quite reasonable determinations about how easy it’d be to capture and identify Tor traffic without a bunch of whataboutism and “it’s still really good though, ok!” replies which seek to unjustifiably minimise valid concerns because one feels the need to…go on and bat for the project that they feel some association with, or something.

The self-congratulatory cultiness of it only makes me quite suspicious of those making these comments, and if anything further dissuades me from ever committing any time or resources to the project.

[llm_trw]

The issue is that the people making 'level headed' claims have read none of the literature and their mathematical ability seems to end at multiplying numbers together.

It sounds reasonable to anyone who hasn't read the papers, to anyone that has these comments are so wrong that you can't even start explaining what's going wrong without a papers worth of explanation that the people don't read.