> The last hop is the exit node. It can see all of your decrypted network traffic.
Didn't see it clarified in the article, but IIRC for onion services like OP's the traffic doesn't go out of traditional internet exit nodes and traffic is end-to-end encrypted. Not only can the last relay before the onion service not see all of your decrypted network traffic, I don't believe they can tell they are even the last relay.
Traffic analysis has been a known issue as long as Tor has existed. What I'd like to see are solutions. Can Tor be used with some kind of fixed-rate noise type of protocol (I toyed w/ a rudimentary fixed-rate traffic algo once[0])? Or is it too broken and do we need another P2P (fixed-transfer-rate) protocol? i2p, tribbler, etc haven't gained mass adoption.
This is a very good point. There is a huge difference between a Tor client chatting with a Tor hidden service, and a Tor client chatting with a clearnet service.
Furthermore, it's not as simple as 'see all of your decrypted network traffic'. Perhaps the Tor client is talking with the clearnet server over TLS 1.3. This presents much more difficulty for the malicious exit node.
Didn't see it clarified in the article, but IIRC for onion services like OP's the traffic doesn't go out of traditional internet exit nodes and traffic is end-to-end encrypted. Not only can the last relay before the onion service not see all of your decrypted network traffic, I don't believe they can tell they are even the last relay.
Traffic analysis has been a known issue as long as Tor has existed. What I'd like to see are solutions. Can Tor be used with some kind of fixed-rate noise type of protocol (I toyed w/ a rudimentary fixed-rate traffic algo once[0])? Or is it too broken and do we need another P2P (fixed-transfer-rate) protocol? i2p, tribbler, etc haven't gained mass adoption.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/deaf9/blob/master/mask/context_read...