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From a privacy perspective, is there any point in trying to torify ethereum nodes?

I know there's a script to do that in bitcoin, although doing so may ironically made the bitcoin node more vulnerable to attacks.

Follow up question: has anyone successfully torified their geth node? I don't think ip addresses are logged in the block chain, so it's probably hard to verify.

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  • isn't tor support in bitcoin native?
    – q9f
    Commented Feb 4, 2016 at 9:28
  • Also have a look at this question ethereum.stackexchange.com/q/4138/405 as you communicate with your local node, you can't be seen. Then your node communicates with other nodes with encryption and also your transaction is melt into all the others so nine can guess which is yours.
    – Nicolas Massart
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 20:41

3 Answers 3

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If you want to conceal your node's network address as the source of your transaction, and thereby preventing others to associate your network address with your Ethereum address, then you might want to hide your node behind Tor

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    my node communicates with the network. it sends transaction information that contains my wallet's address. but that transaction information is encrypted right? so that all my ISP can tell is that I run an ethereum node but not that a given wallet address belongs to me. that is what I'm trying to determine
    – ekkis
    Commented May 22, 2016 at 22:01
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Follow up question: has anyone successfully torified their geth node? I don't think ip addresses are logged in the block chain, so it's probably hard to verify.

This is non-trivial. Geth requires UDP port 30301 for node discovery, and doesn't currently support SOCKS proxying; Tor supports only TCP.

Previously discussed here.

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Sure, but as you mention, Tor can sometimes make exposure to attacks worse, more details are required to make a better analysis.

It is difficult to verify if ethereum nodes are also Tor nodes, but I suspect you can do this verification by using sites like this to generate a list of Tor nodes and a scripted ethereum node to generate a list of all the ethereum nodes and get the intersection of those lists.

I suspect that the faster block times of ethereum make Tor less appealing, but without use-case specifics it's difficult to be sure.

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  • The list you point to is a list of Tor relays (i.e. nodes through which Tor traffic is routed), which isn't the same as running an Ethereum node through Tor to anonymise it.
    – Richard Horrocks
    Commented Feb 5, 2016 at 19:37
  • On third thought, I think it's clear from my answer that you can't just copy and paste that link and expect a list of exit nodes. There are directions on that page for how to get a list of exit nodes.
    – A. Frederick Dudley
    Commented Feb 5, 2016 at 21:24
  • Okay - I understand what you're getting at now - my bad :)
    – Richard Horrocks
    Commented Feb 5, 2016 at 23:59

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