Nevertheless, some exit nodes have certainly been caught sniffing traffic, but the vast majority have not, many of which are run by privacy-friendly organizations like Mozilla.
In other words, if they just see a Reddit page loading, they have no way to know who is loading it unless it is accompanied by some piece of identifying information. As well, we must distinguish between privacy and anonymity: evil exit nodes sniffing internet traffic do not necessarily compromise your anonymity unless you’re sending private, identifiable information. This is a bit of a trickier claim because there’s no way to verify it. Claim: Tor Exit Nodes Are Evil and Watch Your Traffic After all, there’s no way to verify that VPNs aren’t surveilled. If the Navy wanted a honey pot to use for surveillance, it would be far better off setting up a VPN company with highly competitive prices. Nevertheless, the core concern here is influence: what if the Navy’s funding compelled Tor to insert a backdoor for only the Navy? The problem with this is that Tor is open source, and putting a backdoor into open source code, never mind the code of a project that is intensely scrutinized by skeptics, is a pretty piss poor idea. The US Navy funds Tor because Tor is useful to its operations (its operatives overseas need a secure way to communicate that doesn’t stand out, which Tor provides), as it is to many others, such as law enforcement. Indeed, governments are hardly ever tightly-knit, and it is not uncommon for several agencies to clash. While this is true, it takes on a rather simplistic view of government, and any reasonable level of thinking shows it is of little significance. It will do so by taking several claims about Tor and assessing their validity (in clear and simple terms), before summing up whether Tor is safe to use for two different use-cases (spoiler alert: use-case matters). This article will navigate through these attacks and defenses to clearly convey how safe Tor really is. The reality of the matter is somewhere in the middle. On the right are the nay-sayers, the ‘Tor is a honeypot funded by the US navy’ crowd, who cite NSA exploits, correlation attacks, and the evil exit nodes sniffing your traffic and hacking your docs. On the left are the die-hard Tor supporters, who champion the technology as the liberator of humans, far and wide. While this is a perfectly useful question that should be encouraged, unfortunately it often results in battle-flags being raised and the cavalry being called. One of the most common questions asked about Tor is whether it is safe enough to be relied upon.
Is Tor Safe? | Assessing 5 Claims About Tor’s Security Category: primers
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