Anonymity risks of 2 vs 3 hops

[emigrant]

On Fri, 2010-01-08 at 11:56 -0800, Sam Peterson wrote:
> Having read the heated discussion regarding some people's suggestion
> on the list to provide an option to reduce the number of hops in a
> circuit, I'm curious about something and was wondering if someone
> smarter than I could enlighten me.
> 
> Clearly smarter minds agree that 3 hops are necessary.  However, I'm
> confused as to why, other than probability arguments.  Now I clearly
> understand why 1 hop is bad.  However, with 2 instead of 3, I'm not
> sure I see how it makes things that much worse.  I understand it makes
> things a bit worse, but I don't understand how it makes things
> overwhelmingly worse.
> 
> I understand that with 3 hops, the entry node and middle node have no
> idea whether or not they are the beginning or middle of a circuit,
> which means they can never assume that who they're sending information
> to will be the exit.
> 
> I understand that when only 2 hops are used, an entry node actually
> can assume that the traffic it relays will exit from the destination
> it sends it to.  However, the entry node still doesn't know the final
> destination, and the exit node doesn't know the origin.
> 
> Certainly a rouge entry node could be monitoring it's outgoing tor
> traffic and correlating the destination information to, say, a website
> owned by the operator to try and compromise people's anonymity.
> Certainly this makes end-to-end monitoring a bit easier to accomplish
> and correlate, but doesn't TOR already state that it makes no attempt
> to protect from end-to-end monitoring attacks?
> 
> Clearly the experts think it makes things considerably easier here, so
> maybe there's something I'm missing.  I appreciate all tutelage.
> 

May i know why people need to reduce the number of hosts?
i prefer it be increased instead.

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