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Related papers: Spoiled Onions: Exposing Malicious Tor Exit Relays

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The use of anonymity-based infrastructures and anonymisers is a plausible solution to mitigate privacy problems on the Internet. Tor (short for The onion router) is a popular low-latency anonymity system that can be installed as an end-user…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2012-08-21 Sergio Castillo-Perez , Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

Despite being the most popular privacy-enhancing network, Tor is increasingly adopted by cybercriminals to obfuscate malicious traffic, hindering the identification of malware-related communications between compromised devices and Command…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Ishan Karunanayake , Mashael AlSabah , Nadeem Ahmed , Sanjay Jha

Anonymity networks are providing practical mechanisms to protect its users against censorship by hiding their identity and information content. The best-known anonymity network, The Onion Routing (Tor) network, is however subject to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Anna Engelmann , Admela Jukan

We present ShorTor, a protocol for reducing latency on the Tor network. ShorTor uses multi-hop overlay routing, a technique typically employed by content delivery networks, to influence the route Tor traffic takes across the internet.…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Kyle Hogan , Sacha Servan-Schreiber , Zachary Newman , Ben Weintraub , Cristina Nita-Rotaru , Srinivas Devadas

The Tor network offers network anonymity to its users by routing their traffic through a sequence of relays. A group of nine directory authorities maintains information about all available relay nodes using a distributed directory protocol.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zhongtang Luo , Jianting Zhang , Akshat Neerati , Aniket Kate

The Tor network is a widely used system for anonymous communication. However, Tor is known to be vulnerable to attackers who can observe traffic at both ends of the communication path. In this paper, we show that prior attacks are just the…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2015-03-16 Yixin Sun , Anne Edmundson , Laurent Vanbever , Oscar Li , Jennifer Rexford , Mung Chiang , Prateek Mittal

The popularity of Tor as an anonymity system has made it a popular target for a variety of attacks. We focus on traffic correlation attacks, which are no longer solely in the realm of academic research with recent revelations about the NSA…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Rishab Nithyanand , Oleksii Starov , Adva Zair , Phillipa Gill , Michael Schapira

In an onion routing protocol, messages travel through several intermediaries before arriving at their destinations, they are wrapped in layers of encryption (hence they are called "onions"). The goal is to make it hard to establish who sent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Megumi Ando , Anna Lysyanskaya , Eli Upfal

Tor is an anonymity network that allows offering and accessing various kinds of resources, known as hidden services, while guaranteeing sender and receiver anonymity. The Tor web is the set of web resources that exist on the Tor network,…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Massimo Bernaschi , Alessandro Celestini , Marco Cianfriglia , Stefano Guarino , Flavio Lombardi , Enrico Mastrostefano

Tor is one of the most well-known networks that protects the identity of both content providers and their clients against any tracking or tracing on the Internet. So far, most research attention has been focused on investigating the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Mahdieh Zabihimayvan , Derek Doran

The Onion Router (Tor) relies on path selection algorithms to balance performance and anonymity by determining how traffic flows through its relay network. As Tor scales and usage patterns evolve, default strategies such as…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Siddique Abubakr Muntaka , Jacques Bou Abdo

We model and analyze passive adversaries that monitors Tor traffic crossing the border of a jurisdiction an adversary is controlling. We show that a single adversary is able to connect incoming and outgoing traffic of their border, tracking…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Herman Galteland , Kristian Gjøsteen

Tor provides low-latency anonymous and uncensored network access against a local or network adversary. Due to the design choice to minimize traffic overhead (and increase the pool of potential users) Tor allows some information about the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Shuai Li , Huajun Guo , Nicholas Hopper

Traffic correlation attacks to de-anonymize Tor users are possible when an adversary is in a position to observe traffic entering and exiting the Tor network. Recent work has brought attention to the threat of these attacks by network-level…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-05-13 Rishab Nithyanand , Rachee Singh , Shinyoung Cho , Phillipa Gill

Tor is a widely used anonymity network that conceals user identities by routing traffic through encrypted relays, yet it remains vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks that deanonymize users by matching patterns in ingress and egress…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Binghui Wu , Dinil Mon Divakaran , Levente Csikor , Mohan Gurusamy

Privacy of users in P2P networks goes far beyond their current usage and is a fundamental requirement to the adoption of P2P protocols for legal usage. In a climate of cold war between these users and anti-piracy groups, more and more users…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2010-04-12 Pere Manils , Chaabane Abdelberri , Stevens Le Blond , Mohamed Ali Kaafar , Claude Castelluccia , Arnaud Legout , Walid Dabbous

Previous attacks that link the sender and receiver of traffic in the Tor network ("correlation attacks") have generally relied on analyzing traffic from TCP connections. The TCP connections of a typical client application, however, are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-10-13 Benjamin Greschbach , Tobias Pulls , Laura M. Roberts , Philipp Winter , Nick Feamster

Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses, including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally better known as a conduit for criminal…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Mahdieh Zabihimayvan , Reza Sadeghi , Derek Doran , Mehdi Allahyari

The Tor Network has been a significant part of the Internet for years. Tor was originally started in the Naval Research Laboratory for anonymous Internet browsing and Internet-based communication. From being used for anonymous…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Chaitanya Rahalkar , Anushka Virgaonkar , Kethaki Varadan

Onion services are anonymous network services that are exposed over the Tor network. In contrast to conventional Internet services, onion services are private, generally not indexed by search engines, and use self-certifying domain names…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-07-02 Philipp Winter , Anne Edmundson , Laura M. Roberts , Agnieszka Dutkowska-Zuk , Marshini Chetty , Nick Feamster