Protocol-level attacks against Tor

Tor is a real-world, circuit-based low-latency anonymous communication network, supporting TCP applications over the Internet. In this paper, we present an extensive study of protocol-level attacks against Tor. Different from existing attacks, the attacks investigated in this paper can confirm anonymous communication relationships quickly and accurately by manipulating one single cell and pose a serious threat against Tor. In these attacks, a malicious entry onion router may duplicate, modify, insert, or delete cells of a TCP stream from a sender, which can cause cell recognition errors at the exit onion router. If an accomplice of the attacker at the entry onion router also controls the exit onion router and recognizes such cell recognition errors, the communication relationship between the sender and receiver will be confirmed. These attacks can also be used for launching the denial-of-service (DoS) attack to disrupt the operation of Tor. We systematically analyze the impact of these attacks and our data indicate that these attacks may drastically degrade the anonymity service that Tor provides, if the attacker is able to control a small number of Tor routers. We have implemented these attacks on Tor and our experiments validate their feasibility and effectiveness. We also present guidelines for defending against protocol-level attacks.