Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 27, 2014, 04:17:12 PM

Quote from: Peter Todd on January 27, 2014, 01:29:25 PM

Tor does not fundamentally break by having who runs what nodes be publicly known - that's exactly how Tor already works.

I think you're misreading what was said.

Tor breaks if you pick three relays you think are not collaborating against you, but they actually are. Obviously if the Tor network is flooded with nodes that look superficially unrelated but are all run by an adversay, the chances of being deanonymized go up a lot.

I did not say you can't tell Tor nodes apart, so I'm not "propagating falsehoods". I said you can't know if they're really run by independent entities or by the same guy/people.

Ah, yeah, my mistake, I misread that.

Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 27, 2014, 04:17:12 PM

Anyone who wants to run Tor nodes can get a passport or use their existing one, it's not like there's a "no Tor" rule enforced by any countries passport office.

GCHQ might well be able to fake a large number of British passports, or heck, just use those of their employees. Perhaps they've even been able to hack a foreign country or two's passport agencies - who knows. But you can play geopolitics by having the ZKPOP reveal the issuing country and then picking relays run by citizens of countries that hate each other. That raises the stakes a lot - if GCHQ is forging a foreign countries passports that can, if discovered, turn into a major diplomatic disaster that isn't worth it.

In the current world all they have to do is rent a lot of servers around the world via front companies, hardly a big deal, and then run modified Tor nodes that log circuit activity. It can't get any easier than that.

It's just simple numbers - there's ~3,000 Tor nodes out there, and actually quite a bit less than that in terms of bandwidth product. If you don't create something honest people actually use, on a wide scale, what you've created is something that dishonest people use, on a wider scale. Remember that passports are held by large numbers of people, the GCHQ isn't going to have a hard time finding government employee with all kinds of passports, Russian, Chinese etc. even without faking them. (my former ~50 person company had individuals with those passports, and Iran, India and Pakistan among others) And if they do decide to hack them you've got a handy anonymous ZK proof scheme to cover up the fact you've done that.