Comment by bragr

Considering multiple world governments have already shown in leaked documents that this is exactly what they do, I personally wouldn't trust my secrets with tor.

Pagers and the next day handheld radios exploded on their users! This can be done.

They say the internet is just someone else's computer. With Tor it's the computer of a person who wants you to think it's not their computer, and also that they aren't paying attention to (or somehow can't see) what you're doing on it.

The interesting thing is, the more agencies that run relays, the more they interfere with each other. So having something like US, Russia, and China a each running 25% of the network reduces the chances of any one getting all three relays.

I think the threat model is that the majority are not run by cooperating malicious parties.

Russia, china and usa all dont like each other much so are probably not sharing notes (in theory).

Before 2020 when /r/privacy stimulated conversation that was worthy of good discussion you learned Tor the software made less available nodes accessible with newer deployments, that’s why it got faster. Regardless of how many nodes existed. The routing shifted. Now it’s way faster and there's specifically designated guard nodes seemingly pinged repeatedly out to the same allied nations.

In fact, you should assume they are. This doesn't imply the network doesn't have utility for a given actor.

Pardon my ignorance, but I thought it fruitful to ask: Are there any issues that can arise by doing this on a VPS?

I ask because I know of stories of law enforcement sending inquiries to owners of, say, exit nodes requiring certain information about given traffic. I don't know if this happens for middle-nodes (or whatever they're called).

Moreover, are there any issues with associating a node to, you know, your name and billing information?

I don't know much about this, and although I could look it up, I think that my questions - and your respective answers or those of others - might do some public service of information sharing here.

Many individuals contribute to running relays. And there are non-profit organizations collecting donations to operates Tor exit nodes:

- https://www.torservers.net/

- https://nos-oignons.net/

I run a non-exit node any time I have the spare resources. I2P too. This means they're on the same popular providers that have too many other nodes, though.

Sometimes I set it up as a bridge (hidden entry node) instead.

only exit nodes get there door kicked in and they are the minority and not needed for the tor network to function

> I’ve heard individuals getting doors kicked in for participating in the network, so it’s not individuals.

It's individuals

Not only would you need the node to expose IPs with a wide enough distribution to allow the right path selection, you'd also need to have enough bandwidth available to look like distinct hosts, and ensure any losses in connectivity aren't correlated enough to draw attention (people monitor metrics.torproject.org pretty diligently, and would notice if there was a chunk of bandwidth coming and going in lockstep). At that point, the difference in cost to just actually running legitimately separate hosts is negligible. All empirical evidence points towards the status quo that has existed for most all of Tor's existence: if you want to identify Tor users, there are cheaper ways to do it than dominating the network (and those ways are expensive enough to be outside most people's threat models).

That said, any bandwidth anyone wants to contribute to mitigate such attacks is always appreciated, even if it's more useful for performance reasons in practice. ;)

This is what providers such as https://www.vultr.com/ are for:

https://www.vultr.com/features/datacenter-locations/