Whonix 18 (Qubes): Excluding Tor exit countries – is it still possible and does it make sense security-wise?

[FranklyFlawless]

@Collector

2. Does excluding exit countries meaningfully impact security/anonymity, or is the risk mostly theoretical unless very strict constraints are used?

I previously answered the second question on the Tor Project Forum:

Never use any two countries in the same circuit?

Technically the remaining related questions are more relevant to the Tor Project Forum, but I will still address them here on the Whonix Forum:

@Collector

Is excluding a small set of countries (e.g. 1–2) considered significantly harmful?

It depends on the countries being excluded. Some countries are considered high-impact and will have major tradeoffs in performance and anonymity. You can take a look at what countries have the most consensus weight, along with the probabilities of their relays being used to generate a Tor circuit, using Tor Metrics:

Relay Search

Right now, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US are the top three high-impact countries, so excluding them will dramatically affect your Tor circuit, especially the Tor exit relay.

@Collector

Are there scenarios where exit country exclusion makes sense (legal, compliance, testing, reliability), or is it generally discouraged in all cases?

In most cases it is generally discouraged in order to maintain strong anonymity. It would make more sense to avoid using the same autonomous system in a Tor circuit (hosted in multiple countries) in order to improve network diversity and resilience^[1], like OVHcloud^[2], but that comes with raw performance tradeoffs.

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1. Tor Project | Technical considerations ↩︎

2. Relay Search (currently 19 countries) ↩︎