Having read the heated discussion regarding some people's suggestion on the list to provide an option to reduce the number of hops in a circuit, I'm curious about something and was wondering if someone smarter than I could enlighten me.
Clearly smarter minds agree that 3 hops are necessary. However, I'm confused as to why, other than probability arguments. Now I clearly understand why 1 hop is bad. However, with 2 instead of 3, I'm not sure I see how it makes things that much worse. I understand it makes things a bit worse, but I don't understand how it makes things overwhelmingly worse. I understand that with 3 hops, the entry node and middle node have no idea whether or not they are the beginning or middle of a circuit, which means they can never assume that who they're sending information to will be the exit. I understand that when only 2 hops are used, an entry node actually can assume that the traffic it relays will exit from the destination it sends it to. However, the entry node still doesn't know the final destination, and the exit node doesn't know the origin. Certainly a rouge entry node could be monitoring it's outgoing tor traffic and correlating the destination information to, say, a website owned by the operator to try and compromise people's anonymity. Certainly this makes end-to-end monitoring a bit easier to accomplish and correlate, but doesn't TOR already state that it makes no attempt to protect from end-to-end monitoring attacks? Clearly the experts think it makes things considerably easier here, so maybe there's something I'm missing. I appreciate all tutelage. -- Sam Peterson [email protected] [email protected] *********************************************************************** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to [email protected] with unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
