[tor-talk] Network diversity [was: Should I warn against Tor?]

[Jens Lechtenboerger]

On Fr, Jul 19 2013, Gregory Maxwell wrote: 

> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Jens Lechtenboerger 
> <tortalk at informationelle-selbstbestimmung-im-internet.de> wrote: 
>>> but going much further than that may well decrease your 
>>> security. 
>> 
>> How, actually?  I’m aware that what I’m doing is a departure 
>> from network diversity to obtain anonymity.  I’m excluding what 
>> I consider unsafe based on my current understanding.  It might 
>> be that in the end I’ll be unable to find anything that does 
>> not look unsafe to me.  I don’t know what then. 
> 
> Because you're lowering the entropy of the nodes you are 
> selecting maybe all the hosts themselves are simply NSA 
> operated, or if not now, they be a smaller target to compromise.

I don’t buy the entropy argument.  If the NSA compromises Tor 
nodes, wouldn’t they target as many nodes as possible, regardless 
of guard selection strategies?

Note that I’m avoiding guards that they can monitor without having 
compromised them.

> Maybe it actually turns out that they all use a metro fiber 
> provider in munich which is owned by an NSA shell company.

What are the implications then?  All metropolitan area customer 
data of that provider turned over to the NSA?  As I wrote a couple 
of minutes ago on this list: If that happens everywhere in 
Germany, I don’t see a technical solution, just political ones.
 
> In Germany this may not be much of a risk. But if your logic is 
> applied to someplace that is less of a hotbed of Tor usage it 
> wouldn't be too shocking if all the nodes there were run by some 
> foreign intelligence agency.

Exactly.  Citizens there would be driven by other motives than me.
First, they would need to figure out whether they worry more about 
their own government or about foreign ones.  Then they need to 
decide whether Tor can help and, if so, what nodes to avoid.

Best wishes Jens