Shadow: Running Tor in a Box for Accurate and Efficient Experimentation

Jansen, Rob; Hooper, Nicholas

doi:10.21236/ada559181

Cited by 106 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In contrast to real-world implementations, the simplistic workload models used in these studies assume that web pages are retrieved within a single roundtrip or within a single TCP connection. Note that this discrepancy does not necessarily mean that the results obtained in [17,23,25] are wrong (the authors do consider the limitations of their models when drawing conclusions). As we strive for more realistic evaluations and we want to validate and compare the results obtained in previous studies, we have designed a more comprehensive and accurate traffic model which will be described in the next section.…”

Section: Existing Approaches For the Evaluation Of Petsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Noticeable examples are the network simulator Shadow [17] and the emulation testbed ExperimenTor [5]. Both systems try to accurately model the topology and routing mechanism (Component C ) of the Tor network [11], which is the most popular anonymity system at the moment.…”

Section: Existing Approaches For the Evaluation Of Petsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…File sizes are chosen to match typical web page sizes [20,23]. Intervals are drawn from a distribution obtained in a 2003 study [15,17] or at random with an upper bound of 11 seconds [23]. Others (cf.…”

Section: Existing Approaches For the Evaluation Of Petsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Generating Realistic Application Workloads for Mix-Based Systems for Controllable, Repeatable and Usable Experimentation

Fuchs

Herrmann

Federrath

2013

Security and Privacy Protection in Information Processing Systems

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Section: Existing Approaches For the Evaluation Of Petsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Existing Approaches For the Evaluation Of Petsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Generating Realistic Application Workloads for Mix-Based Systems for Controllable, Repeatable and Usable Experimentation

Fuchs

Herrmann

Federrath

2013

Security and Privacy Protection in Information Processing Systems

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“…Shadow enables us to efficiently run accurate Tor Network experiments by modeling live network characteristics such as relay contributed bandwidth, bandwidth distribution from entry, middle, and exit relays, and geographic distributions of relays [16,18]. Shadow runs real Tor software that allows researchers to experiment with modifications to Tor by directly modifying the Tor source code.…”

Section: Network Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

DeNASA: Destination-Naive AS-Awareness in Anonymous Communications

Barton

Wright

2016

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Prior approaches to AS-aware path selection in Tor do not consider node bandwidth or the other characteristics that Tor uses to ensure load balancing and quality of service. Further, since the AS path from the client's exit to her destination can only be inferred once the destination is known, the prior approaches may have problems constructing circuits in advance, which is important for Tor performance. In this paper, we propose and evaluate DeNASA, a new approach to ASaware path selection that is destination-naive, in that it does not need to know the client's destination to pick paths, and that takes advantage of Tor's circuit selection algorithm. To this end, we first identify the most probable ASes to be traversed by Tor streams. We call this set of ASes the Suspect AS list and find that it consists of eight highest ranking Tier 1 ASes. Then, we test the accuracy of Qiu and Gao AS-level path inference on identifying the presence of these ASes in the path, and we show that inference accuracy is 90%. We develop an AS-aware algorithm called DeNASA that uses Qiu and Gao inference to avoid Suspect ASes. DeNASA reduces Tor stream vulnerability by 74%. We also show that DeNASA has performance similar to Tor. Due to the destination-naive property, time to first byte (TTFB) is close to Tor's, and due to leveraging Tor's bandwidthweighted relay selection, time to last byte (TTLB) is also similar to Tor's.

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“…The length of the pause is drawn from the UNC think-time distribution [12]. This distribution is also used by Jansen and Hopper [13] when simulating Tor users activity in their Shadow simulator. In our evaluation, we focused only on the time it takes for the HTTP client to connect to the web server hosting the page, as our client puzzle protocol affects solely the creation of the circuits.…”

Section: Testing and Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

CellFlood: Attacking Tor Onion Routers on the Cheap

Barbera

Kemerlis

Pappas

et al. 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. In this paper, we introduce a new Denial-of-Service attack against Tor Onion Routers and we study its feasibility and implications. In particular, we exploit a design flaw in the way Tor software builds virtual circuits and demonstrate that an attacker needs only a fraction of the resources required by a network DoS attack for achieving similar damage. We evaluate the effects of our attack on real Tor routers and we propose an estimation methodology for assessing the resources needed to attack any publicly accessible Tor node. Finally, we present the design and implementation of an effective solution to the problem that relies on cryptographic client puzzles, and we present results from its performance and effectiveness evaluation.

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Shadow: Running Tor in a Box for Accurate and Efficient Experimentation

Abstract: Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information.

Cited by 106 publications

References 25 publications

Generating Realistic Application Workloads for Mix-Based Systems for Controllable, Repeatable and Usable Experimentation

Generating Realistic Application Workloads for Mix-Based Systems for Controllable, Repeatable and Usable Experimentation

DeNASA: Destination-Naive AS-Awareness in Anonymous Communications

CellFlood: Attacking Tor Onion Routers on the Cheap

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