Is three hops enough? (was Re: Tor client over a SOCKS proxy, and Tor client running through another Tor Circuit)

Anthony DiPierro or at inbox.org
Fri Apr 28 16:51:35 UTC 2006


On 4/28/06, glymr <glymr_darkmoon at ml1.net> wrote:
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> On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 11:47:07AM -0400, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> >> If there is an attack that can be made, for example, over a 9 hop
> >>  chain where an attacker only has two nodes compromised, I'm not
> >> sure what it is.  I suppose there could be some sort of timing
> >> attack, one that can't be easily mitigated by cover traffic.
> >> Maybe that's what I'm missing.
> what you are missing is that more hops results in a hell of a lot of
> cover traffic, but does nothing about compromised nodes. killing
> responsiveness with so many hops defeats the point of tor tho, since
> its main purpose is for low and medium latency applications.

Well, if it only takes 2 compromised nodes in a circuit to compromise
that circuit, then Tor isn't really useful for anything other than
keeping your IP address out of server logs.  That's fine, as that's
all I use Tor for anyway, and it works well for that limited purpose. 
I just thought there was more potential.

Anyway, as I've said in my other post, I need to delve a lot deeper
into the design information.  I should probably build my own client
while I'm at it - to really understand what's going on.

Thanks for your help and information.

Anthony



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