I understand Tor quite well. Whether connections can be traced depends how powerful you think the attacker is. You can potentially get somewhere doing global timing attacks—though this depends on the volume and timing properties of the traffic of interest.
Maybe more importantly, if enough of the Tor nodes cooperate with the attacker, you can break the anonymity. If you could convince enough Tor operators there was a threat, you could mount that attack. Sufficiently scary malware communicating over Tor ought to do the trick. Alternatively, the powerful attacker might try to compromise the Tor nodes. In the scenario we’re discussing, there are powerful AIs capable of generating exploits. Seems strange to assume that the other side (the AGI-hunters) haven’t got specialized software able to do similarly. Automatic exploit finding and testing is more or less current state-of-the-art. It does not require superhuman AGI.
I understand Tor quite well. Whether connections can be traced depends how powerful you think the attacker is. You can potentially get somewhere doing global timing attacks—though this depends on the volume and timing properties of the traffic of interest.
Maybe more importantly, if enough of the Tor nodes cooperate with the attacker, you can break the anonymity. If you could convince enough Tor operators there was a threat, you could mount that attack. Sufficiently scary malware communicating over Tor ought to do the trick. Alternatively, the powerful attacker might try to compromise the Tor nodes. In the scenario we’re discussing, there are powerful AIs capable of generating exploits. Seems strange to assume that the other side (the AGI-hunters) haven’t got specialized software able to do similarly. Automatic exploit finding and testing is more or less current state-of-the-art. It does not require superhuman AGI.