Tork Circuits and Exit Nodes
 

Hello

My idea was that within TorK is should be possible to create a TOR circuit consisting with my
favourite servers and as well to define the Exit Node?


Is that not possible? Or is there an other possibility to do that
in Icognito (with a GUI:-) ?


Thank's a lot!

John

Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of tor ? .. why would you want to ?

Some servers are considered to be secure and other less. The possibility to define
an exit node is probably even more important.

John

Yes, TorK can do that. Go to the "Tor network" tab and simply drag the desired servers from the "Network" list into the "Circuits" list to build a circuit. You may also right click servers in the "Network" list to restrict how they are used when the Tor client is building circuits.

While it is true that some exit nodes likely perform eavesdropping (or worse, some have been reported to inject javascripts and otherwise alter the content it relays), how can you determine which nodes you can trust and which you can't?

From a technical perspective, all exit nodes eavesdrop on what you do so none of them should be trusted (in practive, however, very few of them does anything malicious with your data). Blacklisting untrusted exit nodes hence implies blocking all of them, which means that you cannot use the Tor network (except for reaching hidden services). The only reasonable way to protect yourself is to learn how to use end-to-end encryption (GPG, https, OTR, etc..) in a secure manner (i.e. verify certificates) for everything that's sensitive.

Ok, in the Network list/section there are some servers which do have a yellow onion/icon marked with "Exit".


1.
I assume that my favourite server has to be dragged to "Circuits"...
But why does the new exit node server not appear under "Circuits"?
What am I doing wrong?

2.
Under "Circuits" sometimes a single server/path is listed per line. Sometimes three are 3 servers/pathes listed per line.

Does that mean in the fist case my TOR traffic is routed over one/1
TOR server and in the second case my traffic is routed over 3 servers?

3.
Routig/Entry Guards (only 1 server per line/entry)
What is the purpose the servers listed here?


Thank you very much in advance for any help!

John


PS
Yes I did read the TorK document available under www.anonymityanywhere.com/tork/ :-)

The colour indicates the node speed: gray+red means bad, yellow means ok, green means good. If "exit" is appears in the icon, it's an exit node.

First of all, building your own circuits is a bad idea if you want anonymity. If you want to build your own circuit any way, proceed as follows:
1. simply drag entry guards "X" into an empty space in the circuit list,
2. then drag some other random node "Y" to "X", making it into "X,Y",
3. and lastly drag an exit node "Z" to "X,Y" to get "X,Y,Z", which is a complete circuit ready for use.

Not really; the single node circuits are for directory lookups and similar. They will never be used for applications configured to use Tor -- such traffic will always go through three node circuits.

The entries with a "lock" icon are entry guards. The others I'm not so sure about...

Thank you very much for the help!

John