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Comment by bincat | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I am wrong but I think all communication between the TOR nodes is encrypted. So if you run a node locally (as you should) nothing is revealed. However if you just configure your browser's proxy settings to use outside node all bets are off. Everything should be encrypted from entry node to exit node.

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It depends on how many nodes the listener has ownership of. Just as a point, the Military started TOR. So how many TOR nodes do they have?

At DEFCON I have seen several man in the middle attacks on TOR, the most successful of which required only 50% of the nodes.

If you own and operate a node of which someone is using to route their packets through, you can effectively listen in on that communications. TOR does encrypt its communication between nodes, but it is decrypted, inspected, then encrypted in order to pass through a node, so any packet on a node is for a moment, unencrypted, if the original communication did not have any secondary encryption applied to it.

I am not sure it works like this. You can only listen on communication if you are the first node (you will know the contents, where traffic comes from and the destination) or the last node (you will know the contents and the destination but not the source). And onion routing should mean that encryption layers are peeled off as communication travels through the nodes.

https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...

You are correct about the last node. But the first node knows neither the contents nor the destination.

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