Abstract
Being able to access and provide Internet services anonymously is an important mechanism to ensure freedom of speech in vast parts of the world. Offering location-hidden services on the Internet requires complex redirection protocols to obscure the locations and identities of communication partners. The anonymity system Tor supports such a protocol for providing and accessing TCP-based services anonymously. The complexity of the hidden service protocol results in significantly higher response times which is, however, a crucial barrier to user acceptance. This communication overhead becomes even more evident when using limited access networks like cellular phone networks. We provide comprehensive measurements and statistical analysis of the bootstrapping of client processes and different sub-steps of the Tor hidden service protocol under the influence of limited access networks. Thereby, we are able to identify bottlenecks for low-bandwidth access networks and to suggest improvements regarding these networks.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Chen, F., Perry, M.: Improving Tor path selection. Tor Proposal 151, The Tor Project (July 2008), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/spec/proposals/151-path-selection-improvements.txt
Danezis, G., Serjantov, A.: Statistical disclosure or intersection attacks on anonymity systems. In: Fridrich, J. (ed.) IH 2004. LNCS, vol. 3200, pp. 293–308. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Dingledine, R.: Keep controllers informed as Tor bootstraps. Tor Proposal 137, The Tor Project (July 2008), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/spec/proposals/137-bootstrap-phases.txt
Dingledine, R.: Clients download consensus + microdescriptors. Tor Proposal 158, The Tor Project (January 2009), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/spec/proposals/158-microdescriptors.txt
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N.: Anonymity loves company: Usability and the network effect. In: Anderson, R. (ed.) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2006), Cambridge, UK (June 2006)
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., Syverson, P.: Tor: The second-generation onion router. In: Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium (August 2004)
GSM Assocication. Market Data Summary (2008), http://www.gsmworld.com/newsroom/market-data/market_data_summary.htm
Hays, W.L.: Statistics. In: Holt, Rinehart, Winston (eds.), 3rd edn. (1981) ISBN: 0-03-056706-8
International Telecommunications Union. V.92: Enhancements to Recommendation V.90 (November 2000), http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-V.92-200011-I/en
Köpsell, S.: Low latency anonymous communication – how long are users willing to wait? In: Müller, G. (ed.) ETRICS 2006. LNCS, vol. 3995, pp. 221–237. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Loesing, K., Sandmann, W., Wilms, C., Wirtz, G.: Performance Measurements and Statistics of Tor Hidden Services. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT), Turku, Finland. IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos (2008)
Øverlier, L., Syverson, P.: Improving efficiency and simplicity of Tor circuit establishment and hidden services. In: Borisov, N., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2007. LNCS, vol. 4776, pp. 134–152. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Palfrader, P.: Download server descriptors on demand. Tor Proposal 141, The Tor Project (June 2008), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/spec/proposals/141-jit-sd-downloads.txt
Panchenko, A., Pimenidis, L., Renner, J.: Performance analysis of anonymous communication channels provided by Tor. In: ARES 2008: Proceedings of the 2008 Third International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 221–228. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2008)
Sauter, M.: Communication Systems for the Mobile Information Society. Wiley, Chichester (2006)
The Tor Project. Tor directory protocol, version 3 (2008), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/spec/dir-spec.txt
The Tor Project. Tor Rendezvous Specification (2008), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/spec/rend-spec.txt
Wendolsky, R., Herrmann, D., Federrath, H.: Performance comparison of low-latency anonymisation services from a user perspective. In: Borisov, N., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2007. LNCS, vol. 4776, pp. 233–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lenhard, J., Loesing, K., Wirtz, G. (2009). Performance Measurements of Tor Hidden Services in Low-Bandwidth Access Networks. In: Abdalla, M., Pointcheval, D., Fouque, PA., Vergnaud, D. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5536. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01957-9_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01957-9_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01956-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-01957-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)