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Re: getting more exit nodes



Martin Fick schrieb:
--- Andrew <tor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Roger Dingledine schrieb:
  adding much additional anonymity. (Or is it?)
I believe this to be the most interesting
question... since the user does not know his connection will be relayed via a client-exit, there will only be encryption up until the last relay (the one advertising itself as an exit). Therefore, even if you re-encrypt the data for transfer to the client-exit, it will now be *two* hops being able to read the user's traffic in cleartext.
I don't think that's an improvement... I'd even go
as far as saying it's the exact opposite of what we want.

While your analysis is correct (two potentially
unencrypted hops), the encryption concerns in
themselves should be irrelevant to the concerns of
tor.
True. But...
Tor is not an encryption technology.  The only reason
for encrypting the other hops is for anonymity so that
each hop only knows about its immediate peers.  The
question is whether an unencrypted last leg affects
anonymity?
If everyone would use tor the way it was meant to be used, no problem here. But as you know, rogue exit nodes have become a problem within the tor network; this feature would provide for them a very nice cover to hide under. Since your connection is in plain text for two hops now (or at least two hops can read it as plain text), there's also two hops that can mess with your traffic. And while today it is pretty conclusive to say if someone messed with your traffic, it was the exit node (therefore this node should be considered "bad"), after introducing this feature that would no longer be possible (since, as was proposed, noone but the last node would even know the client-exit existed, or its IP; and even if that was openly advertised, testing for malicious tor nodes would become that much harder). It's not an attack from the outside I fear here, but one from within the network. Something tor is already very vulnerable to as it is.

Regards
Andrew