Abstract
Anonymity networks are becoming increasingly popular in today’s online world as more users attempt to safeguard their online privacy. Tor is currently the most popular anonymity network in use and provides anonymity to both users and services (hidden services). However, the anonymity provided by Tor is also being misused in various ways. Hosting illegal sites for selling drugs, hosting command and control servers for botnets, and distributing censored content are but a few such examples. As a result, various parties, including governments and law enforcement agencies, are interested in attacks that assist in de-anonymising the Tor network, disrupting its operations, and bypassing its censorship circumvention mechanisms. In this survey paper, we review known Tor attacks and identify current techniques for the de-anonymisation of Tor users and hidden services. We discuss these techniques and analyse the practicality of their execution method. We conclude by discussing improvements to the Tor framework that help prevent the surveyed de-anonymisation attacks.
Highlights
Over the past few decades, many online services have impacted the daily lives of Internet users
We first classified Tor attacks into four main categories based on the objective of the attack and explained those categories with examples
We elaborated on de-anonymisation attacks with a taxonomy based on the components used for attack execution
Summary
Over the past few decades, many online services have impacted the daily lives of Internet users. Other use cases of anonymous networks include sensitive communications of military and business organisations over the public Internet [1]. The Tor network [6], which is one of the most widely used anonymity networks today (along with other popular networks such as I2P [17] and Freenet [18]), has been using the concept of onion routing [19]. Onion Proxy (OP): This is a small piece of local software that needs to be installed on the user’s device. It enables communication with the directory servers (DSs), establishes connections in the Tor network, and handles connections from the user’s applications. We refer to this as the Tor client
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