Exploring Deployment Strategies for the Tor Network

Christoph Döpmann; Sebastian Rust; Florian Tschorsch

Paper 2018/661

Exploring Deployment Strategies for the Tor Network

Christoph Döpmann, Sebastian Rust, and Florian Tschorsch

Abstract

In response to upcoming performance and security challenges of anonymity networks like Tor, it will be of crucial importance to be able to develop and deploy performance improvements and state-of-the-art countermeasures. In this paper, we therefore explore different deployment strategies and review their applicability to the Tor network. In particular, we consider flag day, dual stack, translation, and tunneling strategies and discuss their impact on the network, as well as common risks associated with each of them. In a simulation based evaluation, which stems on historical data of Tor, we show that they can practically be applied to realize significant protocol changes in Tor. However, our results also indicate that during the transitional phase a certain degradation of anonymity is unavoidable with current viable deployment strategies.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: anonymity applications implementation
Contact author(s): christoph doepmann @ campus tu-berlin de
History: 2018-07-10: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/661
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/661,
      author = {Christoph Döpmann and Sebastian Rust and Florian Tschorsch},
      title = {Exploring Deployment Strategies for the Tor Network},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/661},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/661}
}