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What's the end game for our hypothetical man in the middle? To edit the article to be subtly incorrect, so you'll misunderstand how Tor works?


Given that this is a Tor article, let's talk about it. Tor exit nodes are a super easy place to perform snooping and injection on non-encrypted requests passing through that boundary. This has been used for simple snooping as well as demonstrated cache poisoning attacks that let the snooper inject JS into later https site requests like banks to exfiltrate passwords.


That's one possibility -- to misinform or give incorrect instructions. This may be more of a risk with this type of content than your run-of-the-mill personal blog.

A more frequent one is injection of ads or tracking scripts, or 'web accelerators' that recompress images. Certain ISPs have been known to do these.


Spy on our country's citizens with deep packet inspection and put anyone on a list that reads anything related to Tor. With HTTPS, the visit of this website would seem 'innocent'.


It's a domain known to host Tor-related content, and HTTPS doesn't hide that you're connecting to it.


This. HTTPS hides the details of your requests to sites you visit, but it doesn't hide the actual sites themselves.


Redirect to another website, push malware, show shock material, exploit a vulnerability in your browser.


All of those can be performed by an url shortening service or advertising or a compromised website (wordpress comes to mind) or ... etc.

/* insert ascii goatse here */




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