Comment by MR4D
I’m a tor novice, so please excuse the simplistic question…
Couldn’t a national security organization just modify a node to route traffic to other nodes it controls instead of uncontrolled nodes?
I’m a tor novice, so please excuse the simplistic question…
Couldn’t a national security organization just modify a node to route traffic to other nodes it controls instead of uncontrolled nodes?
You're saying that if you modify the tor software, other clients will be able to tell before connecting to you? And you can't trick them into sending to a bad node?
If you run a node that forwards traffic to any node other than the one requested by the client then that node won't be able to decrypt the traffic.
The client encrypts traffic to each node on its selected path in turn. If the traffic doesn't reach every desired node in order the traffic can't be decrypted.
No!
The client controls path selection, and each hop is verified using its encryption keys.