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I'm using TOR Browser for 3+ months but I noticed that the Guard node didn't change even once. I thought that Guards change every 1-2 months, but not in my case.

Is this normal?

Thanks!

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Tor does not keep a single guard node that it changes after a certain amount of time. There is a complicated process for how guards are chosen and how Tor uses them. You can read more about this here: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/271-another-guard-selection.txt

The proposal doesn't really explain the different possible state changes, but assuming that a guard is never "re-confirmed" after some time, then a guard should be in the sampled set for at most 120+60 days. Any guard here should be used as a primary guard for less time than this, depending on how the 3 primary guards are filtered. For most people who choose stable guards, my guess is that their first-ever primary guard will be used for about 108-120 days (since they would have been chosen as a primary guard on the same day they were added to the sampled guard set), but then future primary guards will be used for less time than this (since they would have been in the sampled guard set for some time already before being chosen as a primary guard).

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  • Thanks for the detailed response. Today, I noticed that for a few minutes my Guard changed, but after some minutes, changed back to what was before. Why so? could be a network failure or so?
    – user30264
    May 13, 2020 at 21:01

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