Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper’s Paradise

September 10, 2007 D. H. McKee

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Geez. Dudes. Remember that Tor isn’t an end-to-end encryption system.
Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper’s Paradise

Under Tor’s architecture, administrators at the entry point can identify the user’s IP address, but can’t read the content of the user’s correspondence or know its final destination. Each node in the network thereafter only knows the node from which it received the traffic, and it peels off a layer of encryption to reveal the next node to which it must forward the connection. (Tor stands for “The Onion Router.”)
But Tor has a known weakness: The last node through which traffic passes in the network has to decrypt the communication before delivering it to its final destination. Someone operating that node can see the communication passing through this server.
The Tor website includes a diagram showing that the last leg of traffic is not encrypted, and also warns users that “the guy running the exit node can read the bytes that come in and out of there.” But Egerstad says that most users appear to have missed or ignored this information.

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