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Ting: Measuring and Exploiting Latencies Between All Tor Nodes

Authors:

Frank Cangialosi,

Neil SpringAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference

Pages 289 - 302

https://doi.org/10.1145/2815675.2815701

Published: 28 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Tor is a peer-to-peer overlay routing network that achieves unlinkable communication between source and destination.Unlike traditional mix-nets, Tor seeks to balance anonymity and performance, particularly with respect to providing low-latency communication. As a result, understanding the latencies between peers in the Tor network could be an extremely powerful tool in understanding and improving Tor's performance and anonymity properties. Unfortunately, there are no practical techniques for inferring accurate latencies between two arbitrary hosts on the Internet, and Tor clients are not instrumented to collect and report on these measurements. In this paper, we present Ting, a technique for measuring latencies between arbitrary Tor nodes from a single vantage point. Through a ground-truth validation, we show that Ting is accurate, even with few samples, and does not require modifications to existing clients. We also apply Ting to the live Tor network, and show that its measurements are stable over time. We demonstrate that the all-pairs latency datasets that Ting permits can be applied in disparate ways, including faster methods of deanonymizing Tor circuits and efficiently finding long circuits with low end-to-end latency.

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Cited By

Umayya ZMalik DGosain DKumar Sharma PMontpetit MLeivadeas AUhlig SJaved M(2023)PTPerf: On the Performance Evaluation of Tor Pluggable TransportsProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624817(501-525)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618257.3624817
Arora AKarra RLevin DGarman C(2023)Provably Avoiding Geographic Regions for Tor’s Onion ServicesFinancial Cryptography and Data Security10.1007/978-3-031-47754-6_17(289-305)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47754-6_17
Zheng HTian CYang TLin HLiu CZhang ZDou WChen GKuipers FOrda A(2022)FlyMonProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544239(486-502)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544239
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Ting: Measuring and Exploiting Latencies Between All Tor Nodes
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Metrics
2. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference

October 2015

550 pages

ISBN:9781450338486

DOI:10.1145/2815675

General Chairs:
Kenjiro Cho
IIJ/Keio University
,
Kensuke Fukuda
NII/Sokendai
,
Program Chairs:
Vivek Pai
Google
,
Neil Spring
University of Maryland

Copyright © 2015 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 the author(s) 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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SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 October 2015

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Funding Sources

Amazon Web Services in Education
National Science Foundation
National Security Agency

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IMC '15

Sponsor:

SIGMETRICS
SIGCOMM
USENIX Assoc

IMC '15: Internet Measurement Conference

October 28 - 30, 2015

Tokyo, Japan

Acceptance Rates

IMC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 96 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Umayya ZMalik DGosain DKumar Sharma PMontpetit MLeivadeas AUhlig SJaved M(2023)PTPerf: On the Performance Evaluation of Tor Pluggable TransportsProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624817(501-525)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618257.3624817
Arora AKarra RLevin DGarman C(2023)Provably Avoiding Geographic Regions for Tor’s Onion ServicesFinancial Cryptography and Data Security10.1007/978-3-031-47754-6_17(289-305)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47754-6_17
Zheng HTian CYang TLin HLiu CZhang ZDou WChen GKuipers FOrda A(2022)FlyMonProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544239(486-502)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544239
Ding DJeong KXing SConti MFigueiredo RLiu F(2022)SEnD: A Social Network Friendship Enhanced Decentralized System to Circumvent CensorshipsIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2019.294259815:1(346-360)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2019.2942598
Hogan KServan-Schreiber SNewman ZWeintraub BNita-Rotaru CDevadas S(2022)ShorTor: Improving Tor Network Latency via Multi-hop Overlay Routing2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833619(1933-1952)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833619
Buccafurri FDe Angelis VIdone MLabrini CLazzaro S(2021)Achieving Sender Anonymity in Tor against the Global Passive AdversaryApplied Sciences10.3390/app1201013712:1(137)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/app12010137
Nayak PKnightly E(2021)uScopeProceedings of the Twenty-second International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing10.1145/3466772.3467046(171-180)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3466772.3467046
Reininger MArora AHerwig SFrancino NHurst JGarman CLevin DKuipers FCaesar M(2021)BentoProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472919(821-835)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3452296.3472919
Schnitzler TPöpper CDürmuth MKohls K(2021)We Built This Circuit: Exploring Threat Vectors in Circuit Establishment in Tor2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP51992.2021.00030(319-336)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP51992.2021.00030
Buccafurri FDe Angelis VIdone MLabrini C(2021)Extending Routes in Tor to Achieve Recipient Anonymity against the Global Adversary2021 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW)10.1109/CW52790.2021.00048(238-245)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CW52790.2021.00048
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