TY - GEN
T1 - How low can you go
T2 - 13th International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PETS 2013
AU - Geddes, John
AU - Jansen, Rob
AU - Hopper, Nick
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Tor is one of the most popular anonymity systems in use today, in part because of its design goal of providing high performance. This has motivated research into performance enhancing modifications to Tor's circuit scheduling, congestion control, and bandwidth allocation mechanisms. This paper investigates the effects of these proposed modifications on attacks that rely on network measurements as a side channel. We introduce a new class of induced throttling attacks in this space that exploit performance enhancing mechanisms to artificially throttle a circuit. We show that these attacks can drastically reduce the set of probable entry guards on a circuit, in many cases uniquely identifying the entry guard. Comparing to existing attacks, we find that although most of the performance enhancing modifications improve the accuracy of network measurements, the effectiveness of the attacks is reduced in some cases by making the Tor network more homogeneous. We conclude with an analysis of the total reduction in anonymity that clients face due to each proposed mechanism.
AB - Tor is one of the most popular anonymity systems in use today, in part because of its design goal of providing high performance. This has motivated research into performance enhancing modifications to Tor's circuit scheduling, congestion control, and bandwidth allocation mechanisms. This paper investigates the effects of these proposed modifications on attacks that rely on network measurements as a side channel. We introduce a new class of induced throttling attacks in this space that exploit performance enhancing mechanisms to artificially throttle a circuit. We show that these attacks can drastically reduce the set of probable entry guards on a circuit, in many cases uniquely identifying the entry guard. Comparing to existing attacks, we find that although most of the performance enhancing modifications improve the accuracy of network measurements, the effectiveness of the attacks is reduced in some cases by making the Tor network more homogeneous. We conclude with an analysis of the total reduction in anonymity that clients face due to each proposed mechanism.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84884948739&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-39077-7_9
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-39077-7_9
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84884948739
SN - 9783642390760
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 164
EP - 184
BT - Privacy Enhancing Technologies - 13th International Symposium, PETS 2013, Proceedings
Y2 - 10 July 2013 through 12 July 2013
ER -