Speaking of all that... The fact that "Tor Stinks -- NSA"... the need to start fresh investigation, code, develop, and deploy additional new alternative proof-of-concept networks, besides the old 25 year legacy and vacuum that is Tor Project, utilizing full-time base of chaff fill, and other old and new methods that have not hardly well considered and operationally proof tested since yet... including a fresh investigation of mix based networks, is obvious, and is slowly being corroborated, and has been attested by both info-theory and classified operations of the past 70 years... Emphasis * quotes added... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad During World War II and into the 1950s, the U.S. made extensive use of one-time tape systems. In addition to providing confidentiality, *****circuits secured by one-time tape ran continually, *even when there was no traffic*, thus protecting against traffic analysis.***** In 1955, NSA produced some 1,660,000 rolls of one time tape. Each roll was 8 inches in diameter, contained 100,000 characters, lasted 166 minutes and cost $4.55 to produce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KW-26 It was developed in the 1950s by the National Security Agency (NSA) to secure fixed teleprinter circuits that **operated 24 hours a day.** Because the KW-26 sent **a continuous stream of bits, it offered traffic-flow security**. Someone intercepting the ciphertext stream **had no way to judge how many real messages were being sent, making traffic analysis impossible.** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis " In computer security Traffic analysis is also a concern in computer security. An attacker can gain important information by monitoring the frequency and timing of network packets. **A timing attack on the SSH protocol can use timing information to deduce information** about passwords since, during interactive session, SSH transmits each keystroke as a message.[8] **The time between keystroke messages can be studied** using hidden Markov models. Song, et al. claim that it can recover the password fifty times faster than a brute force attack. Onion routing systems are used to gain anonymity. *****Traffic analysis can be used to attack anonymous communication systems like the Tor anonymity network.***** Adam Back, Ulf Möeller and Anton Stiglic present traffic analysis attacks against anonymity providing systems .[9] Steven J. Murdoch and George Danezis from University of Cambridge presented [10] research showing that ***traffic-analysis allows adversaries to infer which nodes relay the anonymous streams.*** This reduces the anonymity provided by Tor. They have shown that otherwise unrelated streams can be linked back to the same initiator. Remailer systems can also be attacked via traffic analysis. **If a message is observed going to a remailing server, and an identical-length (if now anonymized) message is seen exiting the server soon after, a traffic analyst may be able to (automatically) connect the sender with the ultimate receiver.** Variations of remailer operations exist that can make traffic analysis less effective. Countermeasures It is difficult to defeat traffic analysis without both encrypting messages and masking the channel. ***When no actual messages are being sent, the channel can be masked [11] *by sending dummy traffic*, similar to the encrypted traffic, thereby keeping bandwidth usage constant*** .[12] "It is very hard to hide information about the size or timing of messages. ***The known solutions require Alice to send a *continuous stream* of messages at the maximum bandwidth she will ever use.*** Song, Dawn Xiaodong; Wagner, David; Tian, Xuqing (2001). "Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on SSH". 10th USENIX Security Symposium. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/pubs/traffic.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060913152709/http://students.cs.tamu.edu/xinwe... " Tor's new "netflow analysis resistance" is limited applicability, not really a general case attempt at diminishing the global/p2p/e2e/n2n Traffic Analysis problem by at least say a worthwhile factor of 10. At least one outline of how to consider doing a base of full time dynamically yielding chaff fill has already been posted at times to these lists. And there are plenty more academic papers on the subject proffering other methods to consider as well. Plus new ones that will come from that process. The user experience under a dynamic chaff and allocated bandwidth system is not likely to be as scarily unusable as some legacy entrenched project$ often like to claim. Timed buckets carrying stuff between nodes worked for ATM networks in the telcos, so for one investigation, see what kind of performance you can get emulating with today's sw, cpu's, and nic's over the net. https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/categories/19-Tor "Tor Stinks -- NSA"