I have just started operating a relay on top of the hidden service I had been operating. I started because I want to give back at least as much bandwidth as I use, but it also occurred to me that it might offer increased traffic analysis resistance.
I’m hoping someone more experienced with the network can go over my reasoning.
An onion service chooses two middle relays, as does the client connecting to it. As I uderstand it, those relays don’t know their position in the chain. But an adversary using a bad relay to try and track can infer when it is the last in the chain forwarding to an onion service, because it can see the destination IP address isn’t on the relay list. So when tor is operating solely as a service, my upstream relay knows it’s sending to a service and can log that and use that knowledge to assist with traffic analysis.
However, when I’m operating as a relay plus service, my IP is on the relay directory list, and the upstream relay has no way to tell if it’s sending a packet to a relay or a service. This, along with the increased traffic anyway, may help with traffic analysis resistance.
Is this a correct assessment?