Onion Routing Protocol Research Articles

Blockchain-Assisted Onion Routing Protocol for Internet of Underwater Vehicle Communication

Leveraging the advancements in the Internet of underwater vehicles (IoUVs) has been actively explored with remarkable potential applications, such as ocean mapping, exploring marine and geological formation, monitoring shipwrecks, ocean patrolling, and surveillance. However, the communication between IoUVs and the control station is highly affected by modern security threats, such as insecure authentication, unpatched access control, and data integrity attacks. To mitigate the aforementioned security issues, in this article, we have proposed an intelligent collaborative framework by amalgamating artificial intelligence (AI) and onion routing (OR) in the IoUV environment. First, AI-enabled classifiers classify the normal and malicious IoUV data to reduce the computational overhead of the OR network. Then, the data is traversed from the multi-layered encrypted OR network and simultaneously validated by verifying token and time-to-live to securely reach its destination. The incorporation of inter planetary file system (IPFS) makes the proposed framework cost-effective and scalable. Finally, the proposed framework is assessed by various evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, decryption time, and scalability.

Deep Learning and Onion Routing-Based Collaborative Intelligence Framework for Smart Homes Underlying 6G Networks

Sensor communication in the smart home environment is still in its infancy as the information exchange between sensors is vulnerable to security threats. Many traditional solutions use single-layer or multi-layer (i.e., onion routing protocol) encryption/decryption algorithms. But, in the traditional onion routing protocol, if the directory server is compromised, it may not track the malicious onion nodes within the onion network. It questioned the path anonymity of the onion routing protocol. Motivated by this, we proposed a blockchain and onion routing (OR)-based secure and trusted framework in the paper. The anonymity of the proposed OR network is maintained by storing and tracking the onion nodes threshold values through the blockchain network. A long short-term memory (LSTM) model is also utilized to classify the sensors data requests as malicious and non-malicious. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated with different performance metrics such as F1 score and accuracy. The LSTM model significantly improves the initial detection rate of malicious data requests from smart home sensors. Over these benefits, we considered the entire communication via 6G channel, reducing the overall communication latency. Additionally, the OR network is simulated over the shadow simulator to analyze the OR network’s performance considering parameters such as packet delivery ratio and malicious onion node detection rate.

B-IoMV: Blockchain-based onion routing protocol for D2D communication in an IoMV environment beyond 5G

Blockchain technology's popularity in terms of security, privacy, traceability, and trust is being applied in various major applications concerning connected autonomous vehicles. One of the most sensitive applications is military operations. We do not compromise with either security, privacy, trust, or communication latency of connected military vehicles, i.e., Internet of military vehicles (IoMVs). Achieving anonymity along with the security and privacy of sender, receiver, and data path for IoMVS is still an open question. Efforts we have made to address the aforementioned issue by proposing a blockchain-based onion routing protocol for IoMVs, i.e., B-IoMV, to achieve secure, trusted, and anonymous D2D communication. We studied the working of onion routing and presented a blockchain and token-based solution to strengthen the security and anonymity of IoMVs. A blockchain-based solution is quite costly and we use InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to make the proposed B-IoMV system cost-effective. Finally, results show that the proposed B-IoMV system achieved better communication latency, data storage cost, and network bandwidth utilization.

A secured tor local network for nuclear power plant industry

The risk of cyber-attacks on a country has grown drastically. The cyber security risks against critical power infrastructure seem to be worsening. Obviously, any sort of assault on an atomic plant is very concerning. An attack that allows hackers to manipulate the system that control a nuclear reactor, while very difficult, could have very serious consequences. The main reason for this attack is vulnerabilities in local computer networks in power plants. Which has direct access to the internet without any major protection against cyber-attacks like phishing attacks against power plant employees, virus injection tools etc., As the main defense against this attacks is to make power plant networks and employees anonymous to the internet and making sure that no one is tracking the employees which can lead to loss of sensitive information of the plant. The Tor onion networking protocol is best suitable for these types of attacks on employees and computer networks in the power plant. Since providing Tor network for individual employee in practically impossible. Our projected work aims to establish an onion router which provide overall coverage of computer systems and employees which has access to power plant inside the perimeter of power plant. To simulate the plant local networks we construct an internet router using raspberry pi which is configured with Tor onion routing protocol access the internet by computers connected to our Router.

Highly Anonymous Mobility-Tolerant Location-Based Onion Routing for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have received considerable attention in recent years. Like any other network, privacy and anonymity are a requirement in VANETs. Classic anonymous routing protocols such as onion routing algorithm are fragile in mobile networks due to frequent link breaks. In this article, we propose a novel onion-based anonymous routing protocol for highly mobile vehicular networks. It introduces the concept of location-based dynamic relay groups. In this concept, vehicles dynamically form groups around specific locations to act as cryptographic onion relays. The proposed protocol satisfies source anonymity, destination anonymity, and route anonymity features and is very scalable. Employment of pseudo-IDs further helps in keeping the real identity of vehicles anonymous. The proposed protocol can modify the chain structure on the fly and make it longer to maintain source/destination location anonymity or cut it short to maintain performance. The extensive simulations conducted based on the SUMO traffic simulator showed that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms the naive onion routing protocol in terms of delivery ratio, delay and number of retransmissions.

Dropping on the Edge: Flexibility and Traffic Confirmation in Onion Routing Protocols

AbstractThe design of Tor includes a feature that is common to most distributed systems: the protocol is flexible. In particular, the Tor protocol requires nodes to ignore messages that are not understood, in order to guarantee the compatibility with future protocol versions. This paper shows how to exploit this flexibility by proposing two new active attacks: one against onion services and the other against Tor clients.Our attack against onion services is a new low-cost side-channel guard discovery attack that makes it possible to retrieve the entry node used by an onion service in one day, without injecting any relay in the network. This attack uses the possibility to send dummy cells that are silently dropped by onion services, in accordance with the flexible protocol design, and the possibility to observe those cells by inspecting public bandwidth measurements, which act as a side channel.Our attack against Tor clients, called the dropmark attack, is an efficient 1-bit conveying active attack that correlates flows. Simulations performed in Shadow show that the attack succeeds with an overwhelming probability and with no noticeable impact on user performance.Finally, we open the discussion regarding a trade-off between flexibility and security in anonymous communication systems, based on what we learned within the scope of our attacks.

Протокол безотказной луковой маршрутизации с подтверждением времени создания сообщения

Протокол безотказной луковой маршрутизации с подтверждением времени создания сообщения

A certificateless approach to onion routing

Onion routing protocols allow users to establish anonymous channels to preserve their privacy over a public network. Several protocols implementing this primitive have been proposed in recent years, and The onion routing network (Tor), a real-life implementation, provides an onion routing service to thousands of users over the Internet. This paper presents Certificateless Onion Routing a new approach to the problem. Starting from the identity-based solution (PB-OR) of Kate et al. (ACM TISSEC 2000), we adopt the certificateless setting introduced by Al-Riyami and Paterson in 2003. Such a setting is particularly well suited in practice as it retains the good aspects of identity-based cryptography (no PKI is required) and traditional public key cryptography (there is no key escrow). Next, we present a novel certificateless key-encapsulation mechanism and we show how to turn it into a very efficient (and provably secure!) certificateless onion routing protocol. When compared with Tor and PB-OR, our protocol offers better performances, especially when current security levels (i.e., 128 bits) are considered. In particular, our scheme significantly improves the computational costs required from each router. In this sense, our solution is up to 7 times faster than PB-OR and up to 11 times faster than Tor.

Quantifying information leakage of randomized protocols

The quantification of information leakage provides a quantitative evaluation of the security of a system. We propose the usage of Markovian processes to model deterministic and probabilistic systems. By using a methodology generalizing the lattice of information approach we model refined attackers capable to observe the internal behavior of the system, and quantify the information leakage of such systems. We also use our method to obtain an algorithm for the computation of channel capacity from our Markovian models. Finally, we show how to use the method to analyze timed and non-timed attacks on the Onion Routing protocol.

AIB-OR: improving onion routing circuit construction using anonymous identity-based cryptosystems.

The rapid growth of Internet applications has made communication anonymity an increasingly important or even indispensable security requirement. Onion routing has been employed as an infrastructure for anonymous communication over a public network, which provides anonymous connections that are strongly resistant to both eavesdropping and traffic analysis. However, existing onion routing protocols usually exhibit poor performance due to repeated encryption operations. In this paper, we first present an improved anonymous multi-receiver identity-based encryption (AMRIBE) scheme, and an improved identity-based one-way anonymous key agreement (IBOWAKE) protocol. We then propose an efficient onion routing protocol named AIB-OR that provides provable security and strong anonymity. Our main approach is to use our improved AMRIBE scheme and improved IBOWAKE protocol in onion routing circuit construction. Compared with other onion routing protocols, AIB-OR provides high efficiency, scalability, strong anonymity and fault tolerance. Performance measurements from a prototype implementation show that our proposed AIB-OR can achieve high bandwidths and low latencies when deployed over the Internet.

Anonymous Connections Based on Onion Routing: A Review and a Visualization Tool

Anonymity of persons and services on the Internet has been an area of growing interest in academia and industry. In this paper, we review work on visualization tools for teaching information security and assurance. We then focus on concepts related to anonymous connections, Onion Routing (OR) protocol, and Tor network. We also present a visualization tool, VISACOR, to demonstrate these concepts. The tool can be used as part of an active and blended instructional strategy for courses related to information security and assurance. We broke down the whole system into several modules that collectively allow the learners to better master the core components, communications, and various modes of operations to achieve anonymity. As a design principle, we aimed to make the tool interactive, comprehensive, and easy to use through animation and user-friendly graphical interface.

Formalizing provable anonymity in Isabelle/HOL

Abstract We formalize in a theorem prover the notion of provable anonymity. Our formalization relies on inductive definitions of message distinguishing ability and observational equivalence on traces observed by the intruder. Our theory differs from its original proposal and essentially boils down to the inductive definition of distinguishing messages with respect to a knowledge set for the intruder. We build our theory in Isabelle/HOL to achieve a mechanical framework for the analysis of anonymity protocols. Its feasibility is illustrated through two case studies of the Crowds and Onion Routing protocols.

Provable Unlinkability Against Traffic Analysis with Low Message Overhead

Rackoff and Simon proved that a variant of Chaum's protocol for anonymous communication, later developed as the Onion Routing Protocol, is unlinkable against a passive adversary that controls all communication links and most of the nodes in a communication system. A major drawback of their analysis is that the protocol is secure only if (almost) all nodes participate at all times. That is, even if only n?N nodes wish to send messages, allN nodes have to participate in the protocol at all times. This suggests necessity of sending dummy messages and a high message overhead. Our first contribution is showing that this is unnecessary. We relax the adversary model and assume that the adversary only controls a certain fraction of the communication links in the communication network. We think this is a realistic adversary model. For this adversary model we show that a low message overhead variant of Chaum's protocol is provably secure. Furthermore, all previous security proofs assumed the a priori distribution on the messages is uniform. We feel this assumption is unrealistic. The analysis we give holds for any a priori information on the communication distribution. We achieve that by combining Markov chain techniques together with information theory tools in a simple and elegant way.

SGor: Trust graph based onion routing

The use of trust for onion routing has been proved effective in thwarting malicious onion routers. However, even state-of-the-art trust-based onion routing protocols still suffer from two key limitations in protecting anonymity. First, these protocols have no means to verify the correctness of the trust they rely on. Second, they run a high risk of being deanonymized by an inference attack due to biased trust distributions. In this paper, we propose SGor, a trust graph based onion routing that mitigates the key limitations of trust in protecting anonymity. SGor is novel with three unique properties. First, SGor aggregates group trust from mutual friends to verify the correctness of users’ trust assignments. Second, SGor employs an adaptive trust propagation algorithm to derive global trust from trust graph. The global trust removes the restriction of users’ local knowledge and defeats inference attacks by guiding users to discover and trust more honest routers (i.e., reducing the bias of trust distribution). Third, SGor is designed to operate in a fully decentralized manner. This decentralized design mitigates the leakage of a priori trust relationships. We evaluate SGor with simulation-based experiments using several real-world social trust datasets. The experimental results confirm that SGor can mitigate key limitations in the use of trust for protecting anonymity but introduces only a few overheads.

Fully non-interactive onion routing with forward secrecy

Onion routing is a privacy-enabling protocol that allows users to establish anonymous channels over a public network. In such a protocol, parties send their messages through \(n\) anonymizing servers (called a circuit) using several layers of encryption. Several proposals for onion routing have been published in recent years, and TOR, a real-life implementation, provides an onion routing service to thousands of users over the Internet. This paper puts forward a new onion routing protocol which outperforms TOR by achieving forward secrecy in a fully non-interactive fashion, without requiring any communication from the router and/or the users and the service provider to update time-related keys. We compare this to TOR which requires \(O(n^2)\) rounds of interaction to establish a circuit of size \(n\). In terms of the computational effort required to the parties, our protocol is comparable to TOR, but the network latency associated with TOR’s high round complexity ends up dominating the running time. Compared to other recently proposed alternative to TOR, such as the PB-OR (PETS 2007) and CL-OR (CCS 2009) protocols, our scheme still has the advantage of being non-interactive (both PB-OR and CL-OR require some interaction to update time-sensitive information), and achieves similar computational performances. We performed implementation and simulation tests that confirm our theoretical analysis. Additionally, while comparing our scheme to PB-OR, we discovered a flaw in the security of that scheme which we repair in this paper. Our solution is based on the application of forward secure encryption. We design a forward secure encryption scheme (of independent interest) to be used as the main encryption scheme in our onion routing protocol.

ANOC: Anonymous Network-Coding-Based Communication with Efficient Cooperation

Practical wireless network coding (e.g., COPE) is a promising technique that can enhance the throughput of wireless networks. However, such a technique also bears a serious security drawback: it breaks the current privacy-preserving protocols (e.g., Onion Routing), since their operations conflict each other. As user privacy in wireless networks is highly valued nowadays, a new privacy-preserving scheme that can function with wireless network coding becomes indispensable. To address such a challenge, we apply the idea of cooperative networking and design a novel anonymity scheme named ANOC, which can function in network-coding-based wireless mesh networks. ANOC is built upon the classic Onion Routing protocol, and resolves its conflict with network coding by introducing efficient cooperation among relay nodes. Using ANOC, we can perform network coding to achieve a higher throughput, while still preserving user privacy in wireless mesh networks. We formally show how ANOC achieves the property of relationship anonymity, and conduct extensive experiments via nsclick to demonstrates its feasibility and efficiency when integrated with network coding.

How to communicate anonymously in a network: study and optimisation of efficiency and security of anonymous communication networks

The question of how to communicate anonymously in a communication network is studied in this paper. Two kinds of anonymous communication networks are taken into consideration: onion routing for flexible low-cost applications and mix network for verifiable high-security applications. A new onion routing protocol is proposed in this paper to achieve higher efficiency in onion routing. A new mix network is proposed in this paper to achieve strong security with the minimum assumption and get rid of the other assumptions and conditions in the existing shuffling schemes. So for both kinds of applications of anonymous communication with better solutions are provided in this paper.