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Open proxies forward traffic on behalf of any Internet user. Listed on open proxy aggregator sites, they are often used to bypass geographic region restrictions or circumvent censorship. Open proxies sometimes also provide a weak form of…
The very nature of operations in peer-to-peer systems such as BitTorrent exposes information about participants to their peers. Nodes desiring anonymity, therefore, often chose to route their peer-to-peer traffic through anonymity relays,…
Based on the principle of onion routing, the Tor network achieves anonymity for its users by relaying user data over a series of intermediate relays. This approach makes congestion control in the network a challenging task. As of today,…
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate…
Humans make decisions based on the information they obtain from several major sources, among which the comments of others in Internet forums play an increasing role. Such forums cover a wide spectrum of topics and represent an essential…
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…
The architectures of deployed anonymity systems such as Tor suffer from two key problems that limit user's trust in these systems. First, paths for anonymous communication are built without considering trust relationships between users and…
Online social networks, such as Facebook and twitter, are a growing phenomenon in today's world, with various platforms providing capabilities for individuals to collaborate through messaging and chatting as well as sharing of content such…
One of the main challenges faced by a user today is protecting their privacy, especially during widespread surveil- lance. This led to the development of privacy infrastructures whose main purpose is to guarantee users privacy. However,…
The study of network robustness is a critical tool in the characterization and sense making of complex interconnected systems such as infrastructure, communication and social networks. While significant research has been conducted in all of…
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals or organizations called nodes, which are connected by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, common interest, and exchange of finance, relationships…
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…
Tor is an anonymity network used by millions of people every day to evade censorship and protect their browsing activity from privacy threats such as mass surveillance. Unfortunately, Tor has been shown to be vulnerable to website…
User-generated content sites routinely block contributions from users of privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective,…
Tor enables anonymous web browsing and access to anonymous onion websites. Prior work has focused on crawling and content analysis rather than on what users actually try to access. Our honeypot approach measures engagement across onion-site…
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…
The clandestine nature of covert networks makes reliable data difficult to obtain and leads to concerns with missing data. We explore the use of network models to represent missingness mechanisms. Exponential random graph models provide a…
Website fingerprinting attacks, which use statistical analysis on network traffic to compromise user privacy, have been shown to be effective even if the traffic is sent over anonymity-preserving networks such as Tor. The classical attack…
Social learning algorithms provide models for the formation of opinions over social networks resulting from local reasoning and peer-to-peer exchanges. Interactions occur over an underlying graph topology, which describes the flow of…
The Internet is constantly changing, and its hierarchy was recently shown to become flatter. Recent studies of inter-domain traffic showed that large content providers drive this change by bypassing tier-1 networks and reaching closer to…