On the occasions when Alice’s traffic is exiting the tor network from Mallory’s end node (without regard to the locations and number of intermediate hops), there would be a functional replacement for the need to have physical access to Bob’s network, as all traffic from Alice to Bob would pass through Mallory’s node with all the intermediate encryption stripped off (assuming that Bob’s server did not support end-to-end encryption, of course).īy using a VPN service that has a high enough Tor traffic volume, the ability of Eve or Mallory to correlate Alice and Bob’s traffic is severely hindered. Because the Tor network allows anyone to run an end node, Mallory could simply have physical access to Alice’s network and then run an end node herself. Further, this attack does not necessitate physical-level access to both Alice and Bob’s individual networks. It has been demonstrated since 2002 that Eve can correlate traffic between Alice and Bob with a degree of accuracy that completely eliminates false positives. This is a scenario we know already exists at both the individual ISP level and at the level of major backbone interconnects through government access. Additionally, Eve is positioned to passively monitor traffic coming both from Alice and to Bob.
In this first scenario, Alice is connecting to Bob’s server over the Tor network. Additionally, we will be assuming that you have basic knowledge of how the Tor network functions. If you are not familiar with these characters see the wikipedia entry. For simplicity’s sake, we will be using the common cryptographic archetypes of Alice and Bob et. The first vulnerability we are going to examine is the scenario where the attacker is passively monitoring the connection of both the sender and recipient. See our guide on vetting VPN providers here.įor an in-depth guide on using Tor with a VPN see Advanced Privacy and Anonymity - Part 3. This article assumes you have picked a VPN service after carefully vetting them and you trust its operators to honor no-logs promises. Note: While Tor is decentralized and designed in a way that you don’t have to trust a single entity, most VPN services are run by centralized organizations. Today we are going to examine two of the known vulnerabilities in the Tor system and then see how using a trustworthy VPN service in conjunction with Tor can mitigate many of those vulnerabilities thus substantially reducing your privacy risk surface. While it has shown itself to be an invaluable tool in protecting one’s privacy through anonymity, it is anything but a panacea. The Tor network has been a useful tool for the privacy-aware internet users since 2002. Back to Privacy Guides Why use Tor with a VPN service?
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