You have to be just as sure of the proxy you’re using as you would be of the exit site you’re reaching normally. Of course, a proxy server isn’t exactly anonymous either. You can do this by layering in a level of proxy connection. If you can’t ensure the quality of the reputation of the site you’re reaching from the exit node, you have to ensure the anonymity of the traﬃc you’re sending into the entry node. You have much less ability to avoid sites you don’t trust when the entire purpose of what you’re doing is visiting the seedy underbelly of the internet. On the deep web, sites don’t have those reputations, or those reputations can be seeded and falsified. On the normal web, you can just make sure not to browse websites you don’t trust. It could be an FBI honeypot or a hacker setup designed to harvest data for later sale. Second, it requires you to be visiting a site controlled by a malicious actor. The key components to this circumvention of the anonymity of Tor require two things.įirst, it requires the connection entering the entry node to be yours. The attacker – be they a hacker or the FBI – can just put together 1 and 1 to get 2. You essentially slow down your internet connection for no practical benefit. If all someone needs to track you down using Tor is the ability to force you to download a large file and the ability to monitor some data, they can see both the entry and exit points and ignore Tor’s routing completely.

There have been a lot of big raids from the FBI, the NSA, Europol, and other law enforcement agencies. It’s also not quite as anonymous as people would like to think it is. It’s slow, much slower than using the Internet normally, or even through a single proxy server.

You enter it and they have no idea where you exit. You essentially put a cloud in the way of anyone trying to track your traﬃc. The idea of layered connection bouncing through an anonymized network with semi-random exit nodes is a good one, when it comes to security.

Tor project anonymity online