concurrent circuits for traffic fragmentation

[andrew at torproject.org]

On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 11:13:41PM -0400, mansourmoufid at gmail.com wrote 1.4K bytes in 32 lines about:
: While Tor makes no claims of protecting unencrypted traffic at and
: past exit nodes, it should be possible to mitigate the threat of
: sniffing to a certain degree by fragmenting traffic. What I mean by
: that is that a Tor client should be able to use more than one circuit
: in the network at a time. For example, if a PDF file is downloaded
: through Tor, half of it could pass through one exit node, and the
: other through a second.

I think the first sentence is the problem to address.  Users should
encrypt their traffic on the Internet.  This should be true regardless
of transport mechanism; Tor, smtps, imaps, pop3s, https, etc.    

We tried to discourage some non-encrypted protocols over Tor by setting
WarnPlaintextPorts to 23, 109, 110, 143 by default.  Hopefully, this has
stopped people from giving out their login credentials to anyone on the
Internet (whether tor, wifi, etc).  

I don't expect tcp to protect my traffic, therefore I don't expect Tor
to do it either.  

See
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#Youshouldspliteachconnectionovermanypaths.
for a more direct answer to your suggestion.

-- 
Andrew Lewman
The Tor Project
pgp 0x31B0974B

Website: https://www.torproject.org/
Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/
Identi.ca: torproject