this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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I don't have one. Thanks for asking, you made me actually reconsider the truthfulness of my own statement... I was just parroting back what I heard many times, years ago, among the people that attended a hacklab from the city I was living in back then.
Same goes with the 'tip' that said that Tor was initially funded by the US Military (which apparently is true, but then the project turn out to be independent.) These two "facts" were presented, and parroted back and forth in that space a lot.
It would be great to have real analysis knowing which data centers or actors have the biggest control of exit nodes. If there's really a way to de-anonimyze any traffic from there.
PS. Since we are on the topic, another concern regarding Tor network is the possibility of correlation attacks. It always strikes me how ISP stops providing connection at 'random' if you were a frequent user. Pretty sure there's legal forces behind it... but that's my paranoia. Now those minutes or hours offline sprinkled here and there to my router were a fact. Anyway, the dark web is really full of a lot sick places. I'd rather just stay away from it entirely and use a VPN for my privacy when searching media and stuff. That's a lesson I learned.
Thank you, it is refreshing to see someone honestly and earnestly engaging in a conversation about this. The "Tor is a honeypot" thing is very often an all but religiously held belief.
To truly and reliably de-anonymize Tor traffic, one would need to run over 51% of all Tor nodes. Since the US is not the only entity potentially interested in that (Russia and China might be as well), unless these entities coordinate and share data, they will thwart one another from reaching that kind of saturation.
It might be possible to somewhat fuzzily reason about Tor users by observing traffic on both sides of the tunnel, using timing and packet sizes for analysis. But a). it is going to be very fuzzy; b). it requires global network observation capability. NSA might or might not have that to some extent, but they would not risk exposing that for anything but the most valuable targets.
VPNs are a specific tool for a specific thing, they don't "preserve privacy" in the general sense. You are basically trading ISP's or local spooks' ability to observe your traffic for VPN's operator's and the local spooks' there ability to do so. In some cases it makes sense, in some – not so much.
Depends on your threat model.™