Ant Colony Optimization based approach to filter IP Address from TOR network

Abstract

Tor network is used to power the connections through Tor. The Tor network has several proxy servers through which the online requests are encrypted and routed. Thus it is difficult to identify the users in a tor network. Tor network is used to host hidden websites which are utilized by the cybercriminals to hide their identity and engage in malicious behavior. To prevent the hackers from malicious behavior, the connections from tor IP addresses must be blocked. An Ant Colony Optimization based approach to filter tor IP address (ACOFT) algorithm is proposed in this paper which filters the incoming tor IP address based on the IP addresses of the tor exit nodes in a database. The advantage of ACOFT algorithm is that the search space is categorized and the incoming IP address is searched in the reduced search space. This approach of searching reduces the search time compared to the existing search techniques. The time complexity of ACOFT is O(log <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> s) where ‘ <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{s}$</tex> ‘ denotes the count of tor IP addresses in the search space and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathrm{s} &lt; \mathrm{m}$</tex> , where ‘ <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{m}$</tex> ‘ denotes the count of tor IP addresses in the database.