Abstract
In the past decades, the internet has emerged as the fastest way to access information. However, this revolutionary information age comes with its own set of challenges. The privacy of Internet users is at increasing risk with the advances in surveillance techniques. Users’ online behavior, activities, and even personal information are being tracked by ISPs and major tech companies. In response to the increasing need for preserving and protecting the privacy of online users, anonymity networks were developed. Tor anonymity network is a low-latency anonymity network that has gained quite a good reputation over the past years and is being adopted by thousands of users. With the great attention Tor’s network is getting, the original design of Tor was proven to have performance limiting issues. With the motivation for addressing the performance limitation in Tor, we present QuicTor, a datagram-based design to solve Tor’s transport-layer limiting issue. We evaluated the performance of QuicTor in comparison to vanilla Tor as well as other performance-enhancing proposals. QuicTor achieved significant performance improvements for interactive applications as well as streaming applications. Running Tor over a datagram-based protocol entails a careful security analysis. In this article, we assess the behavior of QuicTor under side-channel attacks aiming to de-anonymize Tor’s clients. We show that the performance improvements brought by QuicTor do not reduce the anonymity of clients under the investigated types of attacks.
Highlights
Since its introduction in the 1950s, the internet has revolutionized the landscape of computers and communications on a global scale and is nowadays an integral part of daily lives
WORK In this work, we presented an assessment of the performance of different applications over QuicTor using a realistic network setup
We presented an analysis of the security and anonymity of QuicTor
Summary
Since its introduction in the 1950s, the internet has revolutionized the landscape of computers and communications on a global scale and is nowadays an integral part of daily lives. Tor anonymity network is designed based on the concept of Onion Routing [8], [9], to hide the link between the source and destination of TCP traffic. A significant result of these results was that the current design of Tor’s transport layer is one of the major sources of delay in the network Motivated by this knowledge, the Tor community started considering the use of datagram protocols as the base for the transport layer. We address the existing problem in Tor’s transport layer and expand on the proposed design for running Tor over QUIC in [17]. We implemented diverse types of attacks and assessed their impact on QuicTor in comparison to vanilla Tor. The rest of the article is organized as follows; in Section 2 we present the necessary background of Tor’s anonymity network and QUIC protocol.
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