Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Establishing the Trustworthiness of Nodes without External Tokens (eg Passports)
by
Mike Hearn
on 27/01/2014, 16:17:12 UTC
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.

Quote
Meanwhile if the GCHQ is your adversary, why are you making their job easier by giving them a huge advantage - they have access to tens of thousands of real and faked passports - that the honest defenders don't have?

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.