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Hosting a Tor relay and/or bridge and using it to mix one’s own traffic might be beneficial for anonymity. Advanced users only! Please refer to the write-ups by The Tor Project, the developers of the Tor software.
Quote The Tor Project New low cost traffic analysis attacks and mitigations [archive]:
In terms of mitigating the use of these vectors in attacks against Tor, here’s our recommendations for various groups in our community:
Users: Do multiple things at once with your Tor client
Because Tor uses encrypted TLS connections to carry multiple circuits, an adversary that externally observes Tor client traffic to a Tor Guard node will have a significantly harder time performing classification if that Tor client is doing multiple things at the same time. This was studied in section 6.3 of this paper [archive] by Tao Wang and Ian Goldberg. A similar argument can be made for mixing your client traffic with your own Tor Relay or Tor Bridge that you run, but that is very tricky to do correctly [archive] for it to actually help.
Was there in past some research statement or argument that hosting a Tor relay or bridge and at the same time use it for oneself being actually harmful to one’s anonymity?