Anonymity and Monitoring: How to Monitor the Infrastructure of an Anonymity System

The Tor network is a widely deployed anonymity system on the Internet used by thousands of users every day. A basic monitoring system has been designed and implemented to allow long-term statistics, provide feedback to the interested user, and detect certain attacks on the network. The implementation has been added to TorStatus, a project to display the current state of the Tor network. During a period of six months, this monitoring system collected data, where information and patterns have been extracted and analyzed. Interestingly, the Tor network is very stable with more than half of all the servers located in Germany and the United States. The data also shows a sinusoidal pattern every 24 h in the total number of servers.

[1]  Sameer Parekh.  Prospects for Remailers , 1996, First Monday.

[2]  Andriy Panchenko,et al.  Performance Analysis of Anonymous Communication Channels Provided by Tor , 2008, 2008 Third International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security.

[3]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Locating hidden servers , 2006, 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'06).

[4]  U Moeller,et al.  Mixmaster Protocol Version 2 , 2004 .

[5]  Guido Wirtz,et al.  Performance Measurements and Statistics of Tor Hidden Services , 2008, 2008 International Symposium on Applications and the Internet.

[6]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect , 2006, WEIS.

[7]  John R. Douceur,et al.  The Sybil Attack , 2002, IPTPS.

[8]  Steven J. Murdoch,et al.  Hot or not: revealing hidden services by their clock skew , 2006, CCS '06.

[9]  Anton Stiglic,et al.  Traffic Analysis Attacks and Trade-Offs in Anonymity Providing Systems , 2001, Information Hiding.

[10]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[11]  Dirk Grunwald,et al.  Low-resource routing attacks against tor , 2007, WPES '07.

[12]  Hannes Federrath,et al.  Project “anonymity and unobservability in the Internet” , 2000, CFP '00.

[13]  R. Dingledine,et al.  Challenges in deploying low-latency anonymity ( DRAFT ) , 2005 .

[14]  Nikita Borisov,et al.  Improving Security and Performance in the Tor Network through Tunable Path Selection , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

[15]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Onion routing , 1999, CACM.

[16]  Birgit Pfitzmann,et al.  ISDN-MIXes: Untraceable Communication with Small Bandwidth Overhead , 1991, Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen.

[17]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Challenges in deploying low-latency anonymity , 2005 .

[18]  Dirk Grunwald,et al.  Shining Light in Dark Places: Understanding the Tor Network , 2008, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[19]  Micah Adler,et al.  The predecessor attack: An analysis of a threat to anonymous communications systems , 2004, TSEC.

[20]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Improving Efficiency and Simplicity of Tor Circuit Establishment and Hidden Services , 2007, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[21]  Whitfield Diffie,et al.  New Directions in Cryptography , 1976, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[22]  Nikita Borisov,et al.  A Tune-up for Tor: Improving Security and Performance in the Tor Network , 2008, NDSS.

[23]  George Danezis,et al.  Mixminion: design of a type III anonymous remailer protocol , 2003, 2003 Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2003..

[24]  Robert N. M. Watson,et al.  Metrics for Security and Performance in Low-Latency Anonymity Systems , 2008, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[25]  K. Leuven,et al.  Introducing Traffic Analysis Attacks , Defences and Public Policy Issues . . . ( Invited Talk ) , 2005 .

[26]  Andrew Hintz,et al.  Fingerprinting Websites Using Traffic Analysis , 2002, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[27]  George Danezis,et al.  Low-cost traffic analysis of Tor , 2005, 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'05).

[28]  Paul Syverson,et al.  Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections , 1999 .

[29]  George Danezis,et al.  A Survey of Anonymous Communication Channels , 2008 .

[30]  George Danezis,et al.  Sphinx: A Compact and Provably Secure Mix Format , 2009, 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[31]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[32]  Klaus Wehrle,et al.  Dynamic Multipath Onion Routing in Anonymous Peer-To-Peer Overlay Networks , 2007, IEEE GLOBECOM 2007 - IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference.