A Look at The Onion Router (Tor)

Posted Jun 3, 2005 6:45 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467)
Parent article: A Look at The Onion Router (Tor)

Running a Tor client is a snap, but running a fully-fledged node is turning out to be a pain. The current Tor server leaks memory eagerly. I restart my daemons every hour to keep them in check. Perhaps obviously, Tor can also involve a truly large amount of traffic. A new node I startup used its 192GB/month transfer quota in only 4 days.

I wish the article hadn't brought up the red herring of the exit node "security problem". Your IP traffic always goes through some piece of equipment belonging to someone else. In fact your packets normally traverse dozens of unknown nodes. Tor is no worse than normal networking in this respect. In fact your data is protected through two Tor hops and only exposed at the end, which is superior. If you want end-to-end security, you must use end-to-end encryption. Tor neither requires nor prevents you from doing so.

Carping about the exit node is pure FUD.