[tor-talk] Matryoshka: Are TOR holes intentional?

[l.m]

To add to what Roger said,

"Roger Dingledine"  wrote:
> But even full scale padding, ignoring the practical side
> of how to get a Tor network that can afford to waste so 
> much bandwidth, doesn't provide protection in the face of 
> active attacks where you induce a gap on one side and 
> then observe the gap on the other side. And it might even 
> be the case that these gaps happen naturally by 
> themselves, due to network congestion and so on, so 
> maybe passive observers will be winners even against 
> a design that does full padding.

All that padding means nothing if an adversary can introduce latency
or gaps *at arbitrary* locations in a path. An adversary that can see
your guard, and who can also see the guards traffic can introduce the
gaps/latency in traffic at any point in your path. You may not even
see the attack without being able to visualize end-to-end bandwidth
statistics. It might be due to a routing problem at a particular node
in the path. Solving this adversary isn't easy because they can hide
behind the design of the internet. There isn't a single anonymity
network that is immune.

--leeroy