Recruiting new tor relays with BRAIDS

  • Authors:
  • Rob Jansen;Nicholas Hopper;Yongdae Kim

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA;University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA;University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Tor, a distributed Internet anonymizing system, relies on volunteers who run dedicated relays. Other than altruism, these volunteers have no incentive to run relays, causing a large disparity between the number of users and available relays. We introduce BRAIDS, a set of practical mechanisms that encourages users to run Tor relays, allowing them to earn credits redeemable for improved performance of both interactive and non-interactive Tor traffic. These performance incentives will allow Tor to support increasing resource demands with almost no loss in anonymity: BRAIDS is robust to well-known attacks. Using a simulation of 20,300 Tor nodes, we show that BRAIDS allows relays to achieve 75% lower latency than non-relays for interactive traffic, and 90% higher bandwidth utilization for non-interactive traffic.