Re:Strength in Numbers: An Entire Ecosystem Relies on Tor
by belorn on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:33AM
(#18901822)
There are multiple counterpoints but most can be summed up that there is no strong argument in favor or either so that one has to fall back on a personal default.
Bandwidth consumption in Tor is not that big at 300Gbit/s. While its not perfectly comparable, a 1gbit/s connection residential connection cost about $100 a month. Imagining 300 users, or rather 7000 servers, is really not that big for a community project by volunteers. Naturally this finding is a double edge sword, as it also mean it is not costly for a nation to become the majority owner of all servers if they wanted to. Bandwidth is cheap. It is so cheap that one ISP has started to roll out 10Gbit/s for residential use.
7000 nodes are nothing for high bandwidth nations, and its not without reason that some over represented nations in the Tor network match those that subsidized broadband infrastructure. Sweden is about as big as UK but with 1/6 of the population. Germany is twice the size of US (https://metrics.torproject.org/bubbles.html#country).
I do not think cost is relevant to the question. Any agencies of any nation could afford it. The question really is if they would bother, and if they could continuously do it stealthy enough to not rouse suspicion. Its rather know that the hardest security to do is to run operation security continuously without mistakes. In additional we have leaks from inside (Snowden, Manning), internal politics, and I personally do not think it is likely that they would have managed to run perfectly stealthy for 16 years. I would give them the benefit of the doubt that any given year they could take over it, but once they do it won't take too long until it is detected.
Bandwidth consumption in Tor is not that big at 300Gbit/s. While its not perfectly comparable, a 1gbit/s connection residential connection cost about $100 a month. Imagining 300 users, or rather 7000 servers, is really not that big for a community project by volunteers. Naturally this finding is a double edge sword, as it also mean it is not costly for a nation to become the majority owner of all servers if they wanted to. Bandwidth is cheap. It is so cheap that one ISP has started to roll out 10Gbit/s for residential use.
7000 nodes are nothing for high bandwidth nations, and its not without reason that some over represented nations in the Tor network match those that subsidized broadband infrastructure. Sweden is about as big as UK but with 1/6 of the population. Germany is twice the size of US (https://metrics.torproject.org/bubbles.html#country).
I do not think cost is relevant to the question. Any agencies of any nation could afford it. The question really is if they would bother, and if they could continuously do it stealthy enough to not rouse suspicion. Its rather know that the hardest security to do is to run operation security continuously without mistakes. In additional we have leaks from inside (Snowden, Manning), internal politics, and I personally do not think it is likely that they would have managed to run perfectly stealthy for 16 years. I would give them the benefit of the doubt that any given year they could take over it, but once they do it won't take too long until it is detected.