Related papers: A Forensic Audit of the Tor Browser Bundle
Anonymity systems such as Tor aim to enable users to communicate in a manner that is untraceable by adversaries that control a small number of machines. To provide efficient service to users, these anonymity systems make full use of…
Annotating blockchains with auxiliary data is useful for many applications. For example, e-crime investigations of illegal Tor hidden services, such as Silk Road, often involve linking Bitcoin addresses, from which money is sent or…
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…
The paper analyses current versions of top three used Internet browsers and compare their security levels to a research done in 2006. The security is measured by analyzing how user data is stored. Data recorded during different browsing…
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…
Dark web crawling is a complex process that involves specific methodologies and techniques to navigate the Tor network and extract data from hidden services. This study proposes a general dark web crawler designed to extract pages handling…
Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks on Tor can infer user destinations from encrypted traffic metadata. However, their real-world effectiveness remains debated due to laboratory settings that fail to capture network fluctuations, evaluate…
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…
The use of the un-indexed web, commonly known as the deep web and dark web, to commit or facilitate criminal activity has drastically increased over the past decade. The dark web is an in-famously dangerous place where all kinds of criminal…
Digital evidence underpin the majority of crimes as their analysis is an integral part of almost every criminal investigation. Even if we temporarily disregard the numerous challenges in the collection and analysis of digital evidence, the…
While anonymity networks such as Tor provide invaluable privacy guarantees to society, they also enable all kinds of criminal activities. Consequently, many blameless citizens shy away from protecting their privacy using such technology for…
Since the Tor network is evolving into an infrastructure for anonymous communication, analyzing the consequences of network growth is becoming more relevant than ever. In particular, adding large amounts of resources may have unintentional…
Tor, one of the most popular censorship circumvention systems, faces regular blocking attempts by censors. Thus, to facilitate access, it relies on "pluggable transports" (PTs) that disguise Tor's traffic and make it hard for the adversary…
Anonymous communication systems are subject to selective denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Selective DoS attacks lower anonymity as they force paths to be rebuilt multiple times to ensure delivery which increases the opportunity for more…
Criminal investigations are inherently complex as they typically involve interactions among various actors like investigators, prosecutors, and defendants. The pervasive integration of technology in daily life adds an extra layer of…
Tor and hidden services have emerged as a practical solution to protect user privacy against tracking and censorship. At the same time, little is known about the lifetime and nature of hidden services. Data collection and study of Tor…
High availability is no longer just a business continuity concern. Users are increasingly dependant on devices that consume and produce data in ever increasing volumes. A popular solution is to have a central repository which each device…
In this era of explosive growth in technology, the internet of things (IoT) has become the game changer when we consider technologies like smart homes and cities, smart energy, security and surveillance, and healthcare. The numerous…
Due to the flexibility, affordability and portability of cloud storage, individuals and companies envisage the cloud storage as one of the preferred storage media nowadays. This attracts the eyes of cyber criminals, since much valuable…
Tor is currently the most popular network for anonymous Internet access. It critically relies on volunteer nodes called bridges for relaying Internet traffic when a user's ISP blocks connections to Tor. Unfortunately, current methods for…