Reduce hops when privacy level allows to save Tor network bandwidth

[Brian Mearns]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Erilenz <erilenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> The following occured to me. Tor is designed to protect users from
> traffic analysis by very technical adversaries. There are many use
> cases where that level of protection isn't required. In those cases,
> if there was a config option to reduce the number of hops in a circuit
> to 2 (or possibly even 1), then users would be able to get themselves a
> more responsive circuit, whilst saving the Tor network overall
> bandwidth.
>
> In a three hop circuit, when x contacts y, the Tor network ends up
> having to transfer 4X the data:
>
> x -(1)> Entry -(2)> Middle -(3)> Exit -(4)> y
>
> In a 2 hop circuit it only has to transfer 75% of that:
>
> x -(1)> Entry -(2)> Exit -(3)> y
>
> --
> Erilenz
[snip]


Isn't an underloaded network a security concern anyway, since it makes
it theoretically easier to track if there's not as much going on in
the network?

-Brian

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