Engineering Commons^™

Strengthening The Anonymity Of Anonymous Communication Systems, Christopher Abbott

All Theses

In this work, we examine why a popular anonymity network, Tor, is vulnerable to timing side-channel attacks. We explore removing this vulnerability from Tor without sacrificing its low-latency which is important for usability.
We find that Tor is vulnerable because inter-packet delays propagate along the network path from the source to the destination. This provides an easily detected signature. We explore techniques for making the timing signature either expensive or impossible to detect.
If each packet took a unique, disjoint path from source to destination the inter-packet delay signature would be undetectable. Jitter and latency would change packet arrival orders. …