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Exploring the potential benefits of expanded rate limiting in Tor: slow and steady wins the race with Tortoise

Authors:

Micah SherrAuthors Info & Claims

ACSAC '11: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Pages 207 - 216

https://doi.org/10.1145/2076732.2076762

Published: 05 December 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Tor is a volunteer-operated network of application-layer relays that enables users to communicate privately and anonymously. Unfortunately, Tor often exhibits poor performance due to congestion caused by the unbalanced ratio of clients to available relays, as well as a disproportionately high consumption of network capacity by a small fraction of filesharing users.

This paper argues the very counterintuitive notion that slowing down traffic on Tor will increase the bandwidth capacity of the network and consequently improve the experience of interactive web users. We introduce Tortoise, a system for rate limiting Tor at its ingress points. We demonstrate that Tortoise incurs little penalty for interactive web users, while significantly decreasing the throughput for filesharers. Our techniques provide incentives to filesharers to configure their Tor clients to also relay traffic, which in turn improves the network's overall performance. We present large-scale emulation results that indicate that interactive users will achieve a significant speedup if even a small fraction of clients opt to run relays.

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Cited By

Basyoni LErbad AMohamed AGuizani M(2022)QDRL: QoS-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Tor's Circuit SchedulingIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2022.31795699:5(3396-3410)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSE.2022.3179569
Jansen RJohnson A(2021)On the Accuracy of Tor Bandwidth EstimationPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_28(481-498)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_28
Zhang ZZhou WSherr MLigatti JOu XKatz JVigna G(2020)Bypassing Tor Exit Blocking with Exit Bridge Onion ServicesProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3372297.3417245(3-16)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372297.3417245
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Index Terms

Exploring the potential benefits of expanded rate limiting in Tor: slow and steady wins the race with Tortoise

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ACSAC '11: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 2011

432 pages

ISBN:9781450306720

DOI:10.1145/2076732

Conference Chair:
Robert H'obbes' Zakon
Zakon Group LLC
,
Program Chairs:
John McDermott
Naval Research Lab
,
Michael Locasto
University of Calgary

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 December 2011

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ACSAC '11: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 5 - 9, 2011

Florida, Orlando, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 497 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Basyoni LErbad AMohamed AGuizani M(2022)QDRL: QoS-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Tor's Circuit SchedulingIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2022.31795699:5(3396-3410)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSE.2022.3179569
Jansen RJohnson A(2021)On the Accuracy of Tor Bandwidth EstimationPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_28(481-498)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_28
Zhang ZZhou WSherr MLigatti JOu XKatz JVigna G(2020)Bypassing Tor Exit Blocking with Exit Bridge Onion ServicesProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3372297.3417245(3-16)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372297.3417245
Lu TSu YWang YZhang XMeng H(2018)Path selection algorithm with minimal delay in wireless sensor networksInternational Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks10.1177/155014771879385614:8(155014771879385)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147718793856
Jansen RTraudt MGeddes JWacek CSherr MSyverson P(2018)KISTACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/327812122:1(1-37)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3278121
Jansen RTraudt MHopper NLie DMannan MBackes MWang X(2018)Privacy-Preserving Dynamic Learning of Tor Network TrafficProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3243734.3243815(1944-1961)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3243734.3243815
Kiran KVignesh BShenoy PVenugopal KPrabhu TPrasad M(2017)Client requirement based path selection algorithm for Tor network2017 8th International Conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT)10.1109/ICCCNT.2017.8204018(1-6)Online publication date: Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCNT.2017.8204018
Alsabah MGoldberg I(2016)Performance and Security Improvements for TorACM Computing Surveys10.1145/294680249:2(1-36)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2946802
Kale TOhzahata SWu CKato T(2016)Evaluating tor modified switching algorithm in the emulation environment2016 22nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC)10.1109/APCC.2016.7581478(510-516)Online publication date: Aug-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/APCC.2016.7581478
Girry KOhzahata SWu CKato T(2015)Reducing Congestion in the Tor Network with Circuit SwitchingJournal of Information Processing10.2197/ipsjjip.23.58923:5(589-602)Online publication date: 2015
https://doi.org/10.2197/ipsjjip.23.589
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