Re: [tor-talk] Using VPN less safe?

[Oskar Wendel <o.wendel@xxxxx>]

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Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>:

> It's a tradeoff -- if somebody somehow breaks the anonymity of your Tor
> circuit, it's nice to have another layer behind that. But if somebody
> guesses that you're using a particular VPN, or you pick a VPN that they're
> already monitoring for other reasons, then you basically let them see the
> beginning of your circuit when otherwise they might not have been able to.

Yeah... and considered that there is no known method of breaking the 
anonymity of circuit, but correlation attacks are known and any realtime 
anonymity network without some kind of noise injected is susceptible to 
them, I guess one should fear correlation more than breaking the circuit 
anonymity and minimize places, where one's traffic could be correlated 
with HS (or exit node) traffic and traced back to him...

So, with this assumption, running Tor directly from home connection should 
be safest, right?

> In a sense you're selecting your VPN to be your guard. If there were
> one super-popular guard in the Tor network, and people used it forever
> rather than doing normal guard rotation, seems to me it would become an
> appealing point for surveillance.

I wonder how many entry guards are monitored, by the way, and if 
correcting bug 17772 didn't make it worse from the surveillance point of 
view, as now there are much fewer nodes to observe...

> Also, this issue is pretty much the same whether you're visiting onion
> sites or other domains.

Right, I am concerned more about hidden services, but it definitely 
applies to both.

- -- 
Oskar Wendel, o.wendel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pubkey: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x6690CC52318DB84C
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