Dishonest Tor relay math question - tor-talk is to lazy

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 16/10/2021 12:00, grarpamp wrote:
> On 10/16/21, Peter Fairbrother <peter at tsto.co.uk> wrote:
>> Except the increased bandwidth cost. And if you have to have padding
>> between each node, or on each link, that becomes very expensive.
>> ...
>> [whatever FUD's/month]
> 
> Again, no, users have already bought whatever speed they like from their ISP,
> they can't shove any more over their link than that, thus there is zero
> increased expense, the most speed they can ever get is literally exactly
> what they paid for, they cannot push R bps or N B/m more beyond what
> they bought, period. And as before, endpoint users on stupid byte rape
> plans can just opt out of base-chaff, and miss out on the extra protection.
> 
>> Suppose you want to download a bloated web page of 4MB in 4 seconds then
>> Running that 24/7 for a month
> 
> No, you only have to run it during the time of your download / activity,
> plus maybe a few more minutes to sync network metadata, test wan
> conditions to peer nodes, negotiate overlay speeds and chaff contracts,
> and start running.

That's good - except an observer can see when you are sending real 
traffic, somewhere within the burst. And maybe correlate that with some 
other network i/o - in fact it almost negates any advantage of a base 
chaff rate.


>> Total size of transfer - compared between whom? UserA and .onion1?
>> But some on userA's and most of .onion1's traffic will be to other people
>> so how does comparing their total size of transfer over a year help?
> 
> A's usage may be to zero other people, and Eve runs onion1 which
> also has no such guarantee, thus whether its 1 minute or 1 decade
> it's game over for A.

yes, except no - assuming there is some other traffic on the network, 
how does the attacker know that A's solitary traffic is to onoin1 and 
not to someone else?

And so on


Peter Fairbrother