Good morning, I had a thought last night that has left me uncertain on which would be the better way to go.
Guard Nodes are meant to be used for months at a time to help prevent certain attacks to deanonymize a user, however wouldn’t that harm your annonyminity when using a VPN first?
Example: Guard Node 4 is one you use and it is an unknown enemy. It can see you connecting to various VPN IPs first on say Mullvad so it always knows that the possibility that it is a continued user is higher and can some what track you. Yes the VPN makes it more difficult but I feel this is something to consider.
Would it not be better when using VPN+Tor to have rotating Guard Nodes be it automatically assigned by refreshing them occassionally/each time or by using different bridges? The VPN is in essence taking the spot of the Guard in this situation.
That misses the point and does not answer my question.
The VPN+Tor is meant to protect against ISP spying and protect againt bad Guard nodes, which makes them not as important.
To say another way - would cycling through the first node when using a VPN help stop tracking from VPN server to VPN server?
Example: Bad Node watches you connect to Romania on X VPN. Then you connect to Sweden on X VPN another day with the same Bad Node. Over months it now had a chance to know all X VPN servers you use and profile you better, right?
Would it not be better when using VPN+Tor to change them up often to protect against that? The exact opposite of when using just Tor?
I guess I don’t understand the situation, what’s the risk in tracking between VPN servers in this case? Most people always connect to the same/fastest VPN server anyways.
A guard node is still needed to protect against certain attacks on the Tor network regardless of your network configuration before Tor.