"Super nodes" in Tor: existence and security implication

Authors:
Chenglong Li;Yibo Xue;Yingfei Dong;Dongsheng Wang
Affiliations:
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList) Beijing, China and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList), Beijing, China;University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList), Beijing, China
Venue:
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
Year:
2011

Citing 16
Cited 0

Crowds: anonymity for Web transactions

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
Onion routing

Communications of the ACM
A protocol for anonymous communication over the Internet

Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms

Communications of the ACM
Web MIXes: a system for anonymous and unobservable Internet access

International workshop on Designing privacy enhancing technologies: design issues in anonymity and unobservability
Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor

SP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
On Flow Marking Attacks in Wireless Anonymous Communication Networks

ICDCS '05 Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
Salsa: a structured approach to large-scale anonymity

Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Tor: the second-generation onion router

SSYM'04 Proceedings of the 13th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 13
Information hiding, anonymity and privacy: a modular approach

Journal of Computer Security - Special issue on WITS'02
Membership-concealing overlay networks

Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
A new cell counter based attack against tor

Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Towards an information theoretic metric for anonymity

PET'02 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
Towards measuring anonymity

PET'02 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
A node-failure-resilient anonymous communication protocol through commutative path hopping

INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
A practical congestion attack on tor using long paths

SSYM'09 Proceedings of the 18th conference on USENIX security symposium

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Tor (the second generation onion routing) is arguably the most popular low-lateney anonymous communication system now. In this paper, we reexamine the anonymity of Tor based on our observation of "super nodes". These nodes are more available and reliable than other nodes and provide high bandwidth for assisting the system in both performance and stability. We first confirm their existence by analyzing the life cycles of node IP addresses and node bandwidth contributions via two correlation approaches, on a set of self-collected data and a set of real data from the Tor official collection. We then analyze the effect of super nodes on the anonymity of Tor, discuss attacks that exploit such knowledge, and verify our analysis with real data to show potential damages. Furthermore, we investigate new attacks that exploit the knowledge of super nodes. Our simulation results show that these attacks can greatly damage the anonymity of Tor.