Re: Some simple changes to the tor architecture I believe may greatly improve it

[Cat Okita <cat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 16 May 2006, glymr wrote:
> I've been following a number of recent threads with great interest and
> in the process came up with a number of ideas for changes to the
> architecture of tor which should be simple to implement and greatly
> improve both performance and anonymity.

As a quick summary - have you read the mailing list archives?  Most of
the things that you're proposing here have been discussed and beaten
into atomic particles long since.

I'm skipping over suggestions 1-3 - they're in the faq, discussed to
bits on the list, and probably in the wiki as well.

I can only hope that I'm reading suggestion 4 wrongly.

It -sounds- like you're saying:

	"Log all of the traffic going out of tor exit nodes, and give
	it to your (local) authorities"

Barring the fact that the NSA[0] are doing a fine job of this sort of thing
already, what on -earth- are you thinking this can do, outside of leaving
you personally liable for all of the traffic exiting your node, -and-
charges of information and identity theft, not to mention ensuring that
a metric ton of tor users are profoundly unhappy with you.

Oh.

I just realized.

Maybe you're trying to get people to stop using tor...

For Suggestion 5, I suggest that you read more about game theory.

Suggestion 6 makes it much easier to do timing and correlation attacks,
and seems rather dubious as such.

> server will maintain this information on the directory. (by the way,
> this suggests that it may be a good idea for accesses to the
> directories, by nodes, be done through a tor circuit, which may already
> be happening but I don't know).

You might want to read the spec -before- commenting, then.

Actually, that holds for your suggestion 7 as well.

... and suggestion 8 - along with some of the research in the field.

Perhaps what you want isn't quite what tor was designed to solve.

cheers!
[0] and the Stasi before them...
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