there's a lot of tor attacks by governments that are researched by professionals and the papers about them. this includes traffic correlation, traffic congestion, timing attacks and so on.
How would we be able to defend ourselves from attacks like those against a global adversary? Can they not analyze world wide traffic through under sea cables and such? i'm assuming they don't necessarily need access to the vpn provider's servers or tor nodes.
Theres also the ASs and exchanges which can be subject to government subpoena. Almost all of tor's nodes route traffic through european ISPs.
You have to understand that a global adversary has unlimited time, effort, teams, and internet backbone support. Eventually they will break your setup, so the best approach is to keep moving.
Honestly, against a global adversary that can monitor autonomous systems and under-sea cables, Tor alone cannot save you. Tor was never built to stop a global passive adversary that sees both ends of the connection at the exact same time.
If a government agency controls or monitors the entry guard node network and the exit node network simultaneously, they can easily map out packet sizes and timing. Bridges like obfs4 help hide that you are using Tor from your local ISP, but they don't fix the core timing analysis problem at the macro level.
The only real cryptographic fix for this is using Mixnets (like Nym or similar networks) because they actually delay packets and inject fake dummy traffic to screw up correlation data.
Right now, we just rely on the fact that governments don't have the infinite storage or computing power to analyze everyone's traffic 24/7. But if you personally become a target of a state-level actor? You're basically playing on hard mode.
If a government agency controls or monitors the entry guard node network and the exit node network simultaneously, they can easily map out packet sizes and timing. Bridges like obfs4 help hide that you are using Tor from your local ISP, but they don't fix the core timing analysis problem at the macro level.
The only real cryptographic fix for this is using Mixnets (like Nym or similar networks) because they actually delay packets and inject fake dummy traffic to screw up correlation data.
Right now, we just rely on the fact that governments don't have the infinite storage or computing power to analyze everyone's traffic 24/7. But if you personally become a target of a state-level actor? You're basically playing on hard mode.
Accurate, The 'moving target' approach is honestly the only practical countermeasure. If you stay static, statistical profiling wins over time. You have to constantly rotate entry points, schedules, and identities just to reset their data collection baseline. Perfect tech doesn't exist, it's all about making it too expensive or tedious for them to keep up.