tor-design.tex 59 KB

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  27. \begin{document}
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  34. \title{Tor: Design of a Second-Generation Onion Router}
  35. %\author{Roger Dingledine \\ The Free Haven Project \\ arma@freehaven.net \and
  36. %Nick Mathewson \\ The Free Haven Project \\ nickm@freehaven.net \and
  37. %Paul Syverson \\ Naval Research Lab \\ syverson@itd.nrl.navy.mil}
  38. \maketitle
  39. \thispagestyle{empty}
  40. \begin{abstract}
  41. We present Tor, a connection-based low-latency anonymous communication
  42. system. Tor is the successor to Onion Routing
  43. and addresses many limitations in the original Onion Routing design.
  44. Tor works in a real-world Internet environment,
  45. % it's user-space too
  46. requires little synchronization or coordination between nodes, and
  47. protects against known anonymity-breaking attacks as well
  48. as or better than other systems with similar design parameters.
  49. % and we present a big list of open problems at the end
  50. \end{abstract}
  51. %\begin{center}
  52. %\textbf{Keywords:} anonymity, peer-to-peer, remailer, nymserver, reply block
  53. %\end{center}
  54. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  55. \Section{Overview}
  56. \label{sec:intro}
  57. Onion Routing is a distributed overlay network designed to anonymize
  58. low-latency TCP-based applications such as web browsing, secure shell,
  59. and instant messaging. Clients choose a path through the network and
  60. build a \emph{virtual circuit}, in which each node in the path knows its
  61. predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic flowing down the circuit
  62. is sent in fixed-size \emph{cells}, which are unwrapped by a symmetric key
  63. at each node (like the layers of an onion) and relayed downstream. The
  64. original Onion Routing project published several design and analysis
  65. papers
  66. \cite{or-jsac98,or-discex00,or-ih96,or-pet00}. While there was briefly
  67. a wide area Onion Routing network,
  68. % how long is briefly? a day, a month? -RD
  69. the only long-running and publicly accessible
  70. implementation was a fragile proof-of-concept that ran on a single
  71. machine. Many critical design and deployment issues were never implemented,
  72. and the design has not been updated in several years.
  73. Here we describe Tor, a protocol for asynchronous, loosely
  74. federated onion routers that provides the following improvements over
  75. the old Onion Routing design, and over other low-latency anonymity systems:
  76. \begin{tightlist}
  77. \item \textbf{Perfect forward secrecy:} The original Onion Routing
  78. design is vulnerable to a single hostile node recording traffic and later
  79. compromising successive nodes in the circuit and forcing them to
  80. decrypt it.
  81. Rather than using
  82. onions to lay the circuits, Tor uses an incremental or \emph{telescoping}
  83. path-building design, where the initiator negotiates session keys with
  84. each successive hop in the circuit. Onion replay detection is no longer
  85. necessary, and the process of building circuits is more reliable, since
  86. the initiator knows when a hop fails and can then try extending to a new node.
  87. \item \textbf{Separation of protocol cleaning from anonymity:}
  88. The original Onion Routing design required a separate ``application
  89. proxy'' for each
  90. supported application protocol, resulting in a lot of extra code --- most
  91. of which was never written, so most applications were not supported.
  92. Tor uses the unified and standard Socks
  93. \cite{socks4,socks5} proxy interface, allowing us to support most TCP-based
  94. programs without modification. This design change allows Tor to
  95. use the protocol-normalization features of privacy-enhancing
  96. application-level proxies such as Privoxy without having to
  97. incorporate those features itself.
  98. \item \textbf{Many TCP streams can share one circuit:} The original
  99. Onion Routing design built one circuit for each application-level
  100. request.
  101. Aside from the performance issues of doing multiple public key
  102. operations for every request, building a circuit for each request can
  103. endanger anonymity.
  104. The very first Onion Routing design \cite{or-ih96} protected against
  105. this to some extent by hiding network access behind an onion
  106. router/firewall that was also forwarding traffic from other nodes.
  107. However, even if this meant complete protection, many users can
  108. benefit from Onion Routing for which neither running one's own node
  109. nor such firewall configurations are adequately convenient to be
  110. feasible. Those users, especially if they engage in certain unusual
  111. communication behaviors, may be identifiable \cite{wright03}. To
  112. complicate the possibility of such attacks Tor multiplexes many
  113. stream down each circuit, but still rotates the circuit
  114. periodically to avoid too much linkability from requests on a single
  115. circuit.
  116. \item \textbf{No mixing, padding, or traffic shaping:}
  117. The original Onion Routing
  118. design called for full link padding both between onion routers and between
  119. onion proxies (that is, users) and onion routers \cite{or-jsac98}. The
  120. later analysis paper \cite{or-pet00} suggested \emph{traffic shaping}
  121. to provide similar protection but use less bandwidth, but did not go
  122. into detail. However, recent research \cite{econymics} and deployment
  123. experience \cite{freedom21-security} suggest that this level of resource
  124. use is not practical or economical; and even full link padding is still
  125. vulnerable to active attacks \cite{defensive-dropping}.
  126. %[An upcoming FC04 paper. I'll add a cite when it's out. -RD]
  127. \item \textbf{Leaky-pipe circuit topology:} Through in-band
  128. signalling within the
  129. circuit, Tor initiators can direct traffic to nodes partway down the
  130. circuit. This allows for long-range padding to frustrate traffic
  131. shape and volume attacks at the initiator \cite{defensive-dropping},
  132. but because circuits are used by more than one application, it also
  133. allows traffic to exit the circuit from the middle -- thus
  134. frustrating traffic shape and volume attacks based on observing exit
  135. points.
  136. %Or something like that. hm. Tone this down maybe? Or support it. -RD
  137. %How's that? -PS
  138. \item \textbf{Congestion control:} Earlier anonymity designs do not
  139. address traffic bottlenecks. Unfortunately, typical approaches to load
  140. balancing and flow control in overlay networks involve inter-node control
  141. communication and global views of traffic. Our decentralized ack-based
  142. congestion control maintains reasonable anonymity while allowing nodes
  143. at the edges of the network to detect congestion or flooding attacks
  144. and send less data until the congestion subsides.
  145. \item \textbf{Directory servers:} Rather than attempting to flood
  146. link-state information through the network, which can be unreliable and
  147. open to partitioning attacks or outright deception, Tor takes a simplified
  148. view towards distributing link-state information. Certain more trusted
  149. onion routers also serve as directory servers; they provide signed
  150. \emph{directories} describing all routers they know about, and which
  151. are currently up. Users periodically download these directories via HTTP.
  152. \item \textbf{End-to-end integrity checking:} Without integrity checking
  153. on traffic going through the network, any onion router on the path
  154. can change the contents of cells as they pass by, e.g. to redirect a
  155. connection on the fly so it connects to a different webserver, or to
  156. tag encrypted traffic and look for the tagged traffic at the network
  157. edges \cite{minion-design}.
  158. \item \textbf{Robustness to failed nodes:} A failed node in a traditional
  159. mix network means lost messages, but thanks to Tor's step-by-step
  160. circuit building, users can notice failed
  161. nodes while building circuits and route around them. Additionally,
  162. liveness information from directories allows users to avoid
  163. unreliable node in the first place.
  164. %We further provide a
  165. %simple mechanism that allows connections to be established despite recent
  166. %node failure or slightly dated information from a directory server. Tor
  167. %permits onion routers to have \emph{router twins} --- nodes that share
  168. %the same private decryption key. Note that because connections now have
  169. %perfect forward secrecy, an onion router still cannot read the traffic
  170. %on a connection established through its twin even while that connection
  171. %is active. Also, which nodes are twins can change dynamically depending
  172. %on current circumstances, and twins may or may not be under the same
  173. %administrative authority.
  174. %
  175. %[Commented out; Router twins provide no real increase in robustness
  176. %to failed nodes. If a non-twinned node goes down, the
  177. %circuit-builder notices this and routes around it. Circuit-building
  178. %is offline, so there shouldn't even be a latency hit. -NM]
  179. \item \textbf{Variable exit policies:} Tor provides a consistent
  180. mechanism for
  181. each node to specify and advertise a policy describing the hosts and
  182. ports to which it will connect. These exit policies
  183. are critical in a volunteer-based distributed infrastructure, because
  184. each operator is comfortable with allowing different types of traffic
  185. to exit the Tor network from his node.
  186. \item \textbf{Implementable in user-space}.
  187. \item \textbf{Rendezvous points and location-protected servers:} Tor
  188. provides an integrated mechanism for responder-anonymity
  189. location-protected servers. [XXX say more.]
  190. [XXX Mention that reply onions are out because they're brittle don't give PFS.]
  191. \end{tightlist}
  192. [XXX carefully mention implementation, emphasizing that experience
  193. deploying isn't there yet, and not all features are implemented.
  194. Mention that it runs, is kinda alpha, kinda deployed, runs on win32.]
  195. We review previous work in Section \ref{sec:background}, describe
  196. our goals and assumptions in Section \ref{sec:assumptions},
  197. and then address the above list of improvements in Sections
  198. \ref{sec:design}-\ref{sec:maintaining-anonymity}. We then summarize
  199. how our design stands up to known attacks, and conclude with a list of
  200. open problems.
  201. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  202. \Section{Background and threat model}
  203. \label{sec:background}
  204. \SubSection{Related work}
  205. \label{sec:related-work}
  206. Modern anonymity designs date to Chaum's Mix-Net\cite{chaum-mix} design of
  207. 1981. Chaum proposed hiding sender-recipient connections by wrapping
  208. messages in several layers of public key cryptography, and relaying them
  209. through a path composed of Mix servers. Mix servers in turn decrypt, delay,
  210. and re-order messages, before relay them along the path towards their
  211. destinations.
  212. Subsequent relay-based anonymity designs have diverged in two
  213. principal directions. Some have attempted to maximize anonymity at
  214. the cost of introducing comparatively large and variable latencies,
  215. for example, Babel\cite{babel}, Mixmaster\cite{mixmaster-spec}, and
  216. Mixminion\cite{minion-design}. Because of this
  217. decision, such \emph{high-latency} networks are well-suited for anonymous
  218. email, but introduce too much lag for interactive tasks such as web browsing,
  219. internet chat, or SSH connections.
  220. Tor belongs to the second category: \emph{low-latency} designs that
  221. attempt to anonymize interactive network traffic. Because such
  222. traffic tends to involve a relatively large numbers of packets, it is
  223. difficult to prevent an attacker who can eavesdrop entry and exit
  224. points from correlating packets entering the anonymity network with
  225. packets leaving it. Although some work has been done to frustrate
  226. these attacks, most designs protect primarily against traffic analysis
  227. rather than traffic confirmation \cite{or-jsac98}. One can pad and
  228. limit communication to a constant rate or at least to control the
  229. variation in traffic shape. This can have prohibitive bandwidth costs
  230. and/or performance limitations. One can also use a cascade (fixed
  231. shared route) with a relatively fixed set of users. This assumes a
  232. significant degree of agreement and provides an easier target for an active
  233. attacker since the endpoints are generally known. However, a practical
  234. network with both of these features and thousands of active users has
  235. been run for many years (the Java Anon Proxy, aka Web MIXes,
  236. \cite{web-mix}).
  237. Another low latency design that was proposed independently and at
  238. about the same time as Onion Routing was PipeNet \cite{pipenet}.
  239. This provided anonymity protections that were stronger than Onion Routing's,
  240. but at the cost of allowing a single user to shut down the network simply
  241. by not sending. It was also never implemented or formally published.
  242. The simplest low-latency designs are single-hop proxies such as the
  243. Anonymizer \cite{anonymizer}, wherein a single trusted server removes
  244. identifying users' data before relaying it. These designs are easy to
  245. analyze, but require end-users to trust the anonymizing proxy.
  246. More complex are distributed-trust, channel-based anonymizing systems. In
  247. these designs, a user establishes one or more medium-term bidirectional
  248. end-to-end tunnels to exit servers, and uses those tunnels to deliver a
  249. number of low-latency packets to and from one or more destinations per
  250. tunnel. Establishing tunnels is comparatively expensive and typically
  251. requires public-key cryptography, whereas relaying packets along a tunnel is
  252. comparatively inexpensive. Because a tunnel crosses several servers, no
  253. single server can learn the user's communication partners.
  254. Systems such as earlier versions of Freedom and Onion Routing
  255. build the anonymous channel all at once (using an onion). Later
  256. designs of Freedom and Onion Routing as described herein build
  257. the channel in stages as does AnonNet
  258. \cite{anonnet}. Amongst other things, this makes perfect forward
  259. secrecy feasible.
  260. Some systems, such as Crowds \cite{crowds-tissec}, do not rely on the
  261. changing appearance of packets to hide the path; rather they employ
  262. mechanisms so that an intermediary cannot be sure when it is
  263. receiving from/sending to the ultimate initiator. There is no public-key
  264. encryption needed for Crowds, but the responder and all data are
  265. visible to all nodes on the path so that anonymity of connection
  266. initiator depends on filtering all identifying information from the
  267. data stream. Crowds is also designed only for HTTP traffic.
  268. Hordes \cite{hordes-jcs} is based on Crowds but also uses multicast
  269. responses to hide the initiator. Herbivore \cite{herbivore} and
  270. P5 \cite{p5} go even further requiring broadcast.
  271. They each use broadcast in very different ways, and tradeoffs are made to
  272. make broadcast more practical. Both Herbivore and P5 are designed primarily
  273. for communication between communicating peers, although Herbivore
  274. permits external connections by requesting a peer to serve as a proxy.
  275. Allowing easy connections to nonparticipating responders or recipients
  276. is a practical requirement for many users, e.g., to visit
  277. nonparticipating Web sites or to exchange mail with nonparticipating
  278. recipients.
  279. Distributed-trust anonymizing systems differ in how they prevent attackers
  280. from controlling too many servers and thus compromising too many user paths.
  281. Some protocols rely on a centrally maintained set of well-known anonymizing
  282. servers. Current Tor design falls into this category.
  283. Others (such as Tarzan and MorphMix) allow unknown users to run
  284. servers, while using a limited resource (DHT space for Tarzan; IP space for
  285. MorphMix) to prevent an attacker from owning too much of the network.
  286. Crowds uses a centralized ``blender'' to enforce Crowd membership
  287. policy. For small crowds it is suggested that familiarity with all
  288. members is adequate. For large diverse crowds, limiting accounts in
  289. control of any one party is more difficult:
  290. ``(e.g., the blender administrator sets up an account for a user only
  291. after receiving a written, notarized request from that user) and each
  292. account to one jondo, and by monitoring and limiting the number of
  293. jondos on any one net- work (using IP address), the attacker would be
  294. forced to launch jondos using many different identities and on many
  295. different networks to succeed'' \cite{crowds-tissec}.
  296. Tor is not primarily designed for censorship resistance but rather
  297. for anonymous communication. However, Tor's rendezvous points, which
  298. enable connections between mutually anonymous entities, also
  299. facilitate connections to hidden servers. These building blocks to
  300. censorship resistance and other capabilities are described in
  301. Section~\ref{sec:rendezvous}. Location-hidden servers are an
  302. essential component for anonymous publishing systems such as
  303. Publius\cite{publius}, Free Haven\cite{freehaven-berk}, and
  304. Tangler\cite{tangler}.
  305. [XXX I'm considering the subsection as ended here for now. I'm leaving the
  306. following notes in case we want to revisit any of them. -PS]
  307. Channel-based anonymizing systems also differ in their use of dummy traffic.
  308. [XXX]
  309. Finally, several systems provide low-latency anonymity without channel-based
  310. communication. Crowds and [XXX] provide anonymity for HTTP requests; [...]
  311. [XXX Mention error recovery?]
  312. STILL NOT MENTIONED:
  313. isdn-mixes\\
  314. real-time mixes\\
  315. rewebbers\\
  316. cebolla\\
  317. [XXX Close by mentioning where Tor fits.]
  318. \Section{Design goals and assumptions}
  319. \label{sec:assumptions}
  320. \subsection{Goals}
  321. % Are these really our goals? ;) -NM
  322. Like other low-latency anonymity designs, Tor seeks to frustrate
  323. attackers from linking communication partners, or from linking
  324. multiple communications to or from a single point. Within this
  325. main goal, however, several design considerations have directed
  326. Tor's evolution.
  327. First, we have tried to build a {\bf deployable} system. [XXX why?]
  328. This requirement precludes designs that are expensive to run (for
  329. example, by requiring more bandwidth than volunteers will easily
  330. provide); designs that place a heavy liability burden on operators
  331. (for example, by allowing attackers to implicate operators in illegal
  332. activities); and designs that are difficult or expensive to implement
  333. (for example, by requiring kernel patches to many operating systems,
  334. or ). [Only anon people need to run special software! Look at minion
  335. reviews]
  336. Second, the system must be {\bf usable}. A hard-to-use system has
  337. fewer users --- and because anonymity systems hide users among users, a
  338. system with fewer users provides less anonymity. Thus, usability is
  339. not only a convenience, but is a security requirement for anonymity
  340. systems.
  341. Third, the protocol must be {\bf extensible}, so that it can serve as
  342. a test-bed for future research in low-latency anonymity systems.
  343. (Note that while an extensible protocol benefits researchers, there is
  344. a danger that differing choices of extensions will render users
  345. distinguishable. Thus, implementations should not permit different
  346. protocol extensions to coexist in a single deployed network.)
  347. The protocol's design and security parameters must be {\bf
  348. conservative}. Additional features impose implementation and
  349. complexity costs. [XXX Say that we don't want to try to come up with
  350. speculative solutions to problems we don't KNOW how to solve? -NM]
  351. [XXX mention something about robustness? But we really aren't that
  352. robust. We just assume that tunneled protocols tolerate connection
  353. loss. -NM]
  354. \subsection{Non-goals}
  355. In favoring conservative, deployable designs, we have explicitly
  356. deferred a number of goals --- not because they are not desirable in
  357. anonymity systems --- but because solving them is either solved
  358. elsewhere, or an area of active research without a generally accepted
  359. solution.
  360. Unlike Tarzan or Morphmix, Tor does not attempt to scale to completely
  361. decentralized peer-to-peer environments with thousands of short-lived
  362. servers.
  363. Tor does not claim to provide a definitive solution to end-to-end
  364. timing or intersection attacks for users who do not run their own
  365. Onion Routers.
  366. % Does that mean we do claim to solve intersection attack for
  367. % the enclave-firewall model? -RD
  368. Tor does not provide \emph{protocol normalization} like the Anonymizer or
  369. Privoxy. In order to provide client indistinguishibility for
  370. complex and variable protocols such as HTTP, Tor must be layered with
  371. a filtering proxy such as Privoxy. Similarly, Tor does not currently
  372. integrate tunneling for non-stream-based protocols; this too must be
  373. provided by an external service.
  374. Tor is not steganographic: it doesn't try to conceal which users are
  375. sending or receiving communications.
  376. \SubSection{Adversary Model}
  377. \label{subsec:adversary-model}
  378. Like all practical low-latency systems, Tor is not secure against a
  379. global passive adversary, which is the most commonly assumed adversary
  380. for analysis of theoretical anonymous communication designs. The adversary
  381. we assume
  382. is weaker than global with respect to distribution, but it is not
  383. merely passive.
  384. We assume a threat model that expands on that from \cite{or-pet00}.
  385. The basic adversary components we consider are:
  386. \begin{description}
  387. \item[Observer:] can observe a connection (e.g., a sniffer on an
  388. Internet router), but cannot initiate connections. Observations may
  389. include timing and/or volume of packets as well as appearance of
  390. individual packets (including headers and content).
  391. \item[Disrupter:] can delay (indefinitely) or corrupt traffic on a
  392. link. Can change all those things that an observer can observe up to
  393. the limits of computational ability (e.g., cannot forge signatures
  394. unless a key is compromised).
  395. \item[Hostile initiator:] can initiate (or destroy) connections with
  396. specific routes as well as vary the timing and content of traffic
  397. on the connections it creates. A special case of the disrupter with
  398. additional abilities appropriate to its role in forming connections.
  399. \item[Hostile responder:] can vary the traffic on the connections made
  400. to it including refusing them entirely, intentionally modifying what
  401. it sends and at what rate, and selectively closing them. Also a
  402. special case of the disrupter.
  403. \item[Key breaker:] can break the key used to encrypt connection
  404. initiation requests sent to a Tor-node.
  405. % Er, there are no long-term private decryption keys. They have
  406. % long-term private signing keys, and medium-term onion (decryption)
  407. % keys. Plus short-term link keys. Should we lump them together or
  408. % separate them out? -RD
  409. %
  410. % Hmmm, I was talking about the keys used to encrypt the onion skin
  411. % that contains the public DH key from the initiator. Is that what you
  412. % mean by medium-term onion key? (``Onion key'' used to mean the
  413. % session keys distributed in the onion, back when there were onions.)
  414. % Also, why are link keys short-term? By link keys I assume you mean
  415. % keys that neighbor nodes use to superencrypt all the stuff they send
  416. % to each other on a link. Did you mean the session keys? I had been
  417. % calling session keys short-term and everything else long-term. I
  418. % know I was being sloppy. (I _have_ written papers formalizing
  419. % concepts of relative freshness.) But, there's some questions lurking
  420. % here. First up, I don't see why the onion-skin encryption key should
  421. % be any shorter term than the signature key in terms of threat
  422. % resistance. I understand that how we update onion-skin encryption
  423. % keys makes them depend on the signature keys. But, this is not the
  424. % basis on which we should be deciding about key rotation. Another
  425. % question is whether we want to bother with someone who breaks a
  426. % signature key as a particular adversary. He should be able to do
  427. % nearly the same as a compromised tor-node, although they're not the
  428. % same. I reworded above, I'm thinking we should leave other concerns
  429. % for later. -PS
  430. \item[Compromised Tor-node:] can arbitrarily manipulate the
  431. connections under its control, as well as creating new connections
  432. (that pass through itself).
  433. \end{description}
  434. All feasible adversaries can be composed out of these basic
  435. adversaries. This includes combinations such as one or more
  436. compromised Tor-nodes cooperating with disrupters of links on which
  437. those nodes are not adjacent, or such as combinations of hostile
  438. outsiders and link observers (who watch links between adjacent
  439. Tor-nodes). Note that one type of observer might be a Tor-node. This
  440. is sometimes called an honest-but-curious adversary. While an observer
  441. Tor-node will perform only correct protocol interactions, it might
  442. share information about connections and cannot be assumed to destroy
  443. session keys at end of a session. Note that a compromised Tor-node is
  444. stronger than any other adversary component in the sense that
  445. replacing a component of any adversary with a compromised Tor-node
  446. results in a stronger overall adversary (assuming that the compromised
  447. Tor-node retains the same signature keys and other private
  448. state-information as the component it replaces).
  449. In general we are more focused on traffic analysis attacks than
  450. traffic confirmation attacks. A user who runs a Tor proxy on his own
  451. machine, connects to some remote Tor-node and makes a connection to an
  452. open Internet site, such as a public web server, is vulnerable to
  453. traffic confirmation. That is, an active attacker who suspects that
  454. the particular client is communicating with the particular server will
  455. be able to confirm this if she can attack and observe both the
  456. connection between the Tor network and the client and that between the
  457. Tor network and the server. Even a purely passive attacker will be
  458. able to confirm if the timing and volume properties of the traffic on
  459. the connnection are unique enough. This is not to say that Tor offers
  460. no resistance to traffic confirmation; it does. We defer discussion
  461. of this point and of particular attacks until Section~\ref{sec:attacks},
  462. after we have described Tor in more detail. However, we note here some
  463. basic assumptions that affect the threat model.
  464. [XXX I think this next subsection should be cut, leaving its points
  465. for the attacks section. But I'm leaving it here for now. The above
  466. line refers to the immediately following SubSection.-PS]
  467. \SubSection{Known attacks against low-latency anonymity systems}
  468. \label{subsec:known-attacks}
  469. We discuss each of these attacks in more detail below, along with the
  470. aspects of the Tor design that provide defense. We provide a summary
  471. of the attacks and our defenses against them in Section~\ref{sec:attacks}.
  472. Passive attacks:
  473. simple observation,
  474. timing correlation,
  475. size correlation,
  476. option distinguishability,
  477. Active attacks:
  478. key compromise,
  479. iterated subpoena,
  480. run recipient,
  481. run a hostile node,
  482. compromise entire path,
  483. selectively DOS servers,
  484. introduce timing into messages,
  485. directory attacks,
  486. tagging attacks
  487. \SubSection{Assumptions}
  488. For purposes of this paper, we assume all directory servers are honest
  489. % No longer true, see subsec:dirservers below -RD
  490. and trusted. Perhaps more accurately, we assume that all users and
  491. nodes can perform their own periodic checks on information they have
  492. from directory servers and that all will always have access to at
  493. least one directory server that they trust and from which they obtain
  494. all directory information. Future work may include robustness
  495. techniques to cope with a minority dishonest servers.
  496. Somewhere between ten percent and twenty percent of nodes are assumed
  497. to be compromised. In some circumstances, e.g., if the Tor network is
  498. running on a hardened network where all operators have had
  499. background checks, the percent of compromised nodes might be much
  500. lower. It may be worthwhile to consider cases where many of the `bad'
  501. nodes are not fully compromised but simply (passive) observing
  502. adversaries or that some nodes have only had compromise of the keys
  503. that decrypt connection initiation requests. But, we assume for
  504. simplicity that `bad' nodes are compromised in the sense spelled out
  505. above. We assume that all adversary components, regardless of their
  506. capabilities are collaborating and are connected in an offline clique.
  507. We do not assume any hostile users, except in the context of
  508. % This sounds horrible. What do you mean we don't assume any hostile
  509. % users? Surely we can tolerate some? -RD
  510. rendezvous points. Nonetheless, we assume that users vary widely in
  511. both the duration and number of times they are connected to the Tor
  512. network. They can also be assumed to vary widely in the volume and
  513. shape of the traffic they send and receive.
  514. [XXX what else?]
  515. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  516. \Section{The Tor Design}
  517. \label{sec:design}
  518. The Tor network is an overlay network; each node is called an onion router
  519. (OR). Onion routers run on normal computers without needing any special
  520. privileges. Each OR maintains a long-term TLS connection to every other
  521. OR (although we look at ways to relax this clique-topology assumption in
  522. section \ref{subsec:restricted-routes}). A subset of the ORs also act as
  523. directory servers, tracking which routers are currently in the network;
  524. see section \ref{subsec:dirservers} for directory server details. Users
  525. run local software called an onion proxy (OP) that fetches directories,
  526. establishes paths (called \emph{virtual circuits}) over the network,
  527. and handles connections from the user applications. Onion proxies accept
  528. TCP streams and multiplex them across the virtual circuit. The onion
  529. router on the other side of the circuit connects to the destinations of
  530. the TCP streams and relays data.
  531. Onion routers have three types of keys. The first key is the identity
  532. (signing) key. An OR uses this key to sign TLS certificates, to sign its
  533. router descriptor (a summary of its keys, address, bandwidth, exit policy,
  534. etc), and to sign directories if it is a directory server. Changing the
  535. identity key of a router is considered equivalent to creating a new
  536. router. The second key is the onion (decryption) key, which is used
  537. for decrypting requests from users to set up a circuit and negotiate
  538. ephemeral keys. Thirdly, each OR shares link keys (generated by TLS)
  539. with the other ORs it's connected to. We discuss rotating these keys in
  540. Section \ref{subsec:rotating-keys}.
  541. Section \ref{subsec:cells} discusses the structure of the fixed-size
  542. \emph{cells} that are the unit of communication in Tor. We describe
  543. in Section \ref{subsec:circuits} how circuits work, and how they are
  544. built, extended, truncated, and destroyed. Section \ref{subsec:tcp}
  545. discusses the process of opening TCP streams through Tor, and finally
  546. Section \ref{subsec:congestion} talks about congestion control and
  547. fairness issues.
  548. \SubSection{Cells}
  549. \label{subsec:cells}
  550. Traffic passes from node to node in fixed-size cells. Each cell is 256
  551. bytes, and consists of a header and a payload. The header includes the
  552. circuit identifier (ACI) which specifies which circuit the cell refers to
  553. (many circuits can be multiplexed over the single TCP connection between
  554. ORs or between an OP and an OR), and a command to describe what to do
  555. with the cell's payload. Cells are either control cells, meaning they are
  556. intended to be interpreted by the node that receives them, or relay cells,
  557. meaning they carry end-to-end stream data. Controls cells can be one of:
  558. \emph{padding} (currently used for keepalive, but can be used for link
  559. padding), \emph{create} or \emph{created} (to set up a new circuit),
  560. or \emph{destroy} (to tear down a circuit).
  561. Relay cells have an additional header (the relay header) after the
  562. cell header, which specifies the stream identifier (many streams can
  563. be multiplexed over a circuit), an end-to-end checksum for integrity
  564. checking, and a relay command. Relay commands can be one of: \emph{relay
  565. data} (for data flowing down the stream), \emph{relay begin} (to open a
  566. stream), \emph{relay end} (to close a stream), \emph{relay connected}
  567. (to notify the OP that a relay begin has succeeded), \emph{relay
  568. extend} and \emph{relay extended} (to extend the circuit by a hop,
  569. and to acknowledge), \emph{relay truncate} and \emph{relay truncated}
  570. (to tear down only part of the circuit, and to acknowledge), \emph{relay
  571. sendme} (used for congestion control), and \emph{relay drop} (used to
  572. implement long-range dummies).
  573. We will talk more about each of these cell types below.
  574. % should there have been a table here? -RD
  575. \SubSection{Circuits and streams}
  576. \label{subsec:circuits}
  577. Users set up circuits incrementally, negotiating a symmetric key with
  578. each hop one at a time. To create a new circuit, the user (call her
  579. Alice) sends a \emph{create} cell to the first node in her chosen
  580. path. The payload is the first half of the Diffie-Hellman handshake,
  581. encrypted to the onion key of the OR (call him Bob). Bob responds with a
  582. \emph{created} cell with the second half of the DH handshake, along with
  583. a hash of $K=g^{xy}$. The goal is to get unilateral entity authentication
  584. (Alice knows she's handshaking with Bob, Bob doesn't care who it is ---
  585. recall that Alice has no key and is trying to remain anonymous) and
  586. unilateral key authentication (Alice and Bob agree on a key, and Alice
  587. knows Bob is the only other person who could know it). We also want
  588. perfect forward secrecy, key freshness, etc.
  589. \begin{equation}
  590. \begin{aligned}
  591. \mathrm{Alice} \rightarrow \mathrm{Bob}&: E_{PK_{Bob}}(g^x) \\
  592. \mathrm{Bob} \rightarrow \mathrm{Alice}&: g^y, H(K | \mathrm{``handshake''}) \\
  593. \end{aligned}
  594. \end{equation}
  595. Being able to prove knowledge of this $K$ shows both that it was Bob
  596. who received $g^x$, and that it was Bob who came up with $y$. We use
  597. PK encryption in the first step (rather than, eg, using the first two
  598. steps of STS, which has a signature in the second step) because we
  599. don't have enough room in a single cell for a public key and also a
  600. signature. Preliminary analysis with the NRL protocol analyzer shows
  601. the above protocol to be secure (including providing PFS) under the
  602. traditional Dolev-Yao model.
  603. % cite Cathy? -RD
  604. % did I use the buzzwords correctly? -RD
  605. To extend a circuit past the first hop, Alice sends a \emph{relay extend}
  606. cell to the last node in the circuit, specifying the address of the new
  607. OR and an encrypted $g^x$ for it. That node copies the half-handshake
  608. into a \emph{create} cell, and passes it to the new OR to extend the
  609. circuit. When it responds with a \emph{created} cell, the penultimate OR
  610. copies the payload into a \emph{relay extended} cell and passes it back.
  611. % please fix my "that OR" pronouns -RD
  612. Once Alice shares a key with each OR on the circuit, she can
  613. start opening TCP streams over it.
  614. Describe how circuits work and how relay cells get passed along,
  615. decrypted etc. This will include mentioning leaky-pipe circuit
  616. topology and end-to-end integrity checking. (Mention tagging.)
  617. Describe how circuits get built, extended, truncated.
  618. \SubSection{Opening and closing streams}
  619. \label{subsec:tcp}
  620. Describe how TCP connections get opened. (Mention DNS issues)
  621. Descibe closing TCP connections and 2-END handshake to mirror TCP
  622. close handshake.
  623. \SubSection{Congestion control and fairness}
  624. \label{subsec:congestion}
  625. Describe circuit-level and stream-level
  626. congestion control issues and solutions.
  627. Describe circuit-level and stream-level fairness issues; cite Marc's
  628. anonnet stuff.
  629. \Section{Other design decisions}
  630. \SubSection{Resource management and DoS prevention}
  631. Describe DoS prevention. cookies before tls begins, rate limiting of
  632. create cells, link-to-link rate limiting, etc.
  633. Mention twins, what the do, what they can't.
  634. How we should do sequencing and acking like TCP so that we can better
  635. tolerate lost data cells.
  636. Mention that designers have to choose what you send across your
  637. circuit: wrapped IP packets, wrapped stream data, etc. [Disspell
  638. TCP-over-TCP misconception.]
  639. Mention that OR-to-OR connections should be highly reliable. If
  640. they aren't, everything can stall.
  641. \SubSection{Exit policies and abuse}
  642. \label{subsec:exitpolicies}
  643. Exit abuse is a serious barrier to wide-scale Tor deployment --- we
  644. must block or limit attacks and other abuse that users can do through
  645. the Tor network.
  646. Each onion router's \emph{exit policy} describes to which external
  647. addresses and ports the router will permit stream connections. On one end
  648. of the spectrum are \emph{open exit} nodes that will connect anywhere;
  649. on the other end are \emph{middleman} nodes that only relay traffic to
  650. other Tor nodes, and \emph{private exit} nodes that only connect locally
  651. or to addresses internal to that node's organization. This private exit
  652. node configuration is more secure for clients --- the adversary cannot
  653. see plaintext traffic leaving the network (e.g. to a webserver), so he
  654. is less sure of Alice's destination. More generally, nodes can require
  655. a variety of forms of traffic authentication \cite{onion-discex00}.
  656. Tor offers more reliability than the high-latency fire-and-forget
  657. anonymous email networks, because the sender opens a TCP stream
  658. with the remote mail server and receives an explicit confirmation of
  659. acceptance. But ironically, the private exit node model works poorly for
  660. email, when Tor nodes are run on volunteer machines that also do other
  661. things, because it's quite hard to configure mail transport agents so
  662. normal users can send mail normally, but the Tor process can only deliver
  663. mail locally. Further, most organizations have specific hosts that will
  664. deliver mail on behalf of certain IP ranges; Tor operators must be aware
  665. of these hosts and consider putting them in the Tor exit policy.
  666. The abuse issues on closed (e.g. military) networks are very different
  667. from the abuse on open networks like the Internet. While these IP-based
  668. access controls are still commonplace on the Internet, on closed networks,
  669. nearly all participants will be honest, and end-to-end authentication
  670. can be assumed for anything important.
  671. Tor is harder than minion because tcp doesn't include an abuse
  672. address. you could reach inside the http stream and change the agent
  673. or something, but that's a very specific case and probably won't help
  674. much anyway.
  675. And volunteer nodes don't resolve to anonymizer.mit.edu so it never
  676. even occurs to people that it wasn't you.
  677. Preventing abuse of open exit nodes is an unsolved problem. Princeton's
  678. CoDeeN project \cite{darkside} gives us a glimpse of what we're in for.
  679. but their solutions, which mainly involve rate limiting and blacklisting
  680. nodes which do bad things, don't translate directly to Tor. Rate limiting
  681. still works great, but Tor intentionally separates sender from recipient,
  682. so it's hard to know which sender was the one who did the bad thing,
  683. without just making the whole network wide open.
  684. even limiting most nodes to allow http, ssh, and aim to exit and reject
  685. all other stuff is sketchy, because plenty of abuse can happen over
  686. port 80. but it's a very good start, because it blocks most things,
  687. and because people are more used to the concept of port 80 abuse not
  688. coming from the machine's owner.
  689. we could also run intrusion detection system (IDS) modules at each tor
  690. node, to dynamically monitor traffic streams for attack signatures. it
  691. can even react when it sees a signature by closing the stream. but IDS's
  692. don't actually work most of the time, and besides, how do you write a
  693. signature for "is sending a mean mail"?
  694. we should run a squid at each exit node, to provide comparable anonymity
  695. to private exit nodes for cache hits, to speed everything up, and to
  696. have a buffer for funny stuff coming out of port 80. we could similarly
  697. have other exit proxies for other protocols, like mail, to check
  698. delivered mail for being spam.
  699. A mixture of open and restricted exit nodes will allow the most
  700. flexibility for volunteers running servers. But while a large number
  701. of middleman nodes is useful to provide a large and robust network,
  702. a small number of exit nodes still simplifies traffic analysis because
  703. there are fewer nodes the adversary needs to monitor, and also puts a
  704. greater burden on the exit nodes.
  705. The JAP cascade model is really nice because they only need one node to
  706. take the heat per cascade. On the other hand, a hydra scheme could work
  707. better (it's still hard to watch all the clients).
  708. Discuss importance of public perception, and how abuse affects it.
  709. ``Usability is a security parameter''. ``Public Perception is also a
  710. security parameter.''
  711. Discuss smear attacks.
  712. \SubSection{Directory Servers}
  713. \label{subsec:dirservers}
  714. First-generation Onion Routing designs \cite{or-jsac98,freedom2-arch} did
  715. % is or-jsac98 the right cite here? what's our stock OR cite? -RD
  716. in-band network status updates: each router flooded a signed statement
  717. to its neighbors, which propagated it onward. But anonymizing networks
  718. have different security goals than typical link-state routing protocols.
  719. For example, we worry more about delays (accidental or intentional)
  720. which cause different parts of the network to have different pictures
  721. of link-state and topology. We also worry about attacks to deceive a
  722. client about the router membership list, topology, or current network
  723. state. Such \emph{partitioning attacks} on client knowledge help an
  724. adversary with limited resources to efficiently deploy those resources
  725. when attacking a target.
  726. Instead, Tor uses a small group of redundant directory servers to
  727. track network topology and node state such as current keys and exit
  728. policies. The directory servers are normal onion routers, but there are
  729. only a few of them and they are more trusted. They listen on a separate
  730. port as an HTTP server, both so participants can fetch current network
  731. state and router lists (a \emph{directory}), and so other onion routers
  732. can upload their router descriptors.
  733. [[mention that descriptors are signed with long-term keys; ORs publish
  734. regularly to dirservers; policies for generating directories; key
  735. rotation (link, onion, identity); Everybody already know directory
  736. keys; how to approve new nodes (advogato, sybil, captcha (RTT));
  737. policy for handling connections with unknown ORs; diff-based
  738. retrieval; diff-based consesus; separate liveness from descriptor
  739. list]]
  740. Of course, a variety of attacks remain. An adversary who controls a
  741. directory server can track certain clients by providing different
  742. information --- perhaps by listing only nodes under its control
  743. as working, or by informing only certain clients about a given
  744. node. Moreover, an adversary without control of a directory server can
  745. still exploit differences among client knowledge. If Eve knows that
  746. node $M$ is listed on server $D_1$ but not on $D_2$, she can use this
  747. knowledge to link traffic through $M$ to clients who have queried $D_1$.
  748. Thus these directory servers must be synchronized and redundant. The
  749. software is distributed with the signature public key of each directory
  750. server, and directories must be signed by a threshold of these keys.
  751. The directory servers in Tor are modeled after those in Mixminion
  752. \cite{minion-design}, but our situation is easier. Firstly, we make the
  753. simplifying assumption that all participants agree on who the directory
  754. servers are. Secondly, Mixminion needs to predict node behavior ---
  755. that is, build a reputation system for guessing future performance of
  756. nodes based on past performance, and then figure out a way to build
  757. a threshold consensus of these predictions. Tor just needs to get a
  758. threshold consensus of the current state of the network.
  759. The threshold consensus can be reached with standard Byzantine agreement
  760. techniques \cite{castro-liskov}.
  761. % Should I just stop the section here? Is the rest crap? -RD
  762. But this library, while more efficient than previous Byzantine agreement
  763. systems, is still complex and heavyweight for our purposes: we only need
  764. to compute a single algorithm, and we do not require strict in-order
  765. computation steps. The Tor directory servers build a consensus directory
  766. through a simple four-round broadcast protocol. First, each server signs
  767. and broadcasts its current opinion to the other directory servers; each
  768. server then rebroadcasts all the signed opinions it has received. At this
  769. point all directory servers check to see if anybody's cheating. If so,
  770. directory service stops, the humans are notified, and that directory
  771. server is permanently removed from the network. Assuming no cheating,
  772. each directory server then computes a local algorithm on the set of
  773. opinions, resulting in a uniform shared directory. Then the servers sign
  774. this directory and broadcast it; and finally all servers rebroadcast
  775. the directory and all the signatures.
  776. The rebroadcast steps ensure that a directory server is heard by either
  777. all of the other servers or none of them (some of the links between
  778. directory servers may be down). Broadcasts are feasible because there
  779. are so few directory servers (currently 3, but we expect to use as many
  780. as 9 as the network scales). The actual local algorithm for computing
  781. the shared directory is straightforward, and is described in the Tor
  782. specification \cite{tor-spec}.
  783. % we should, uh, add this to the spec. oh, and write it. -RD
  784. Using directory servers rather than flooding approaches provides
  785. simplicity and flexibility. For example, they don't complicate
  786. the analysis when we start experimenting with non-clique network
  787. topologies. And because the directories are signed, they can be cached at
  788. all the other onion routers (or even elsewhere). Thus directory servers
  789. are not a performance bottleneck when we have many users, and also they
  790. won't aid traffic analysis by forcing clients to periodically announce
  791. their existence to any central point.
  792. \Section{Rendezvous points: location privacy}
  793. \label{sec:rendezvous}
  794. Rendezvous points are a building block for \emph{location-hidden services}
  795. (aka responder anonymity) in the Tor network. Location-hidden
  796. services means Bob can offer a tcp service, such as a webserver,
  797. without revealing the IP of that service.
  798. We provide this censorship resistance for Bob by allowing him to
  799. advertise several onion routers (his \emph{Introduction Points}) as his
  800. public location. Alice, the client, chooses a node for her \emph{Meeting
  801. Point}. She connects to one of Bob's introduction points, informs him
  802. about her meeting point, and then waits for him to connect to the meeting
  803. point. This extra level of indirection means Bob's introduction points
  804. don't open themselves up to abuse by serving files directly, eg if Bob
  805. chooses a node in France to serve material distateful to the French. The
  806. extra level of indirection also allows Bob to respond to some requests
  807. and ignore others.
  808. We provide the necessary glue so that Alice can view webpages from Bob's
  809. location-hidden webserver with minimal invasive changes. Both Alice and
  810. Bob must run local onion proxies.
  811. The steps of a rendezvous:
  812. \begin{tightlist}
  813. \item Bob chooses some Introduction Points, and advertises them on a
  814. Distributed Hash Table (DHT).
  815. \item Bob establishes onion routing connections to each of his
  816. Introduction Points, and waits.
  817. \item Alice learns about Bob's service out of band (perhaps Bob told her,
  818. or she found it on a website). She looks up the details of Bob's
  819. service from the DHT.
  820. \item Alice chooses and establishes a Meeting Point (MP) for this
  821. transaction.
  822. \item Alice goes to one of Bob's Introduction Points, and gives it a blob
  823. (encrypted for Bob) which tells him about herself, the Meeting Point
  824. she chose, and the first half of an ephemeral key handshake. The
  825. Introduction Point sends the blob to Bob.
  826. \item Bob chooses whether to ignore the blob, or to onion route to MP.
  827. Let's assume the latter.
  828. \item MP plugs together Alice and Bob. Note that MP can't recognize Alice,
  829. Bob, or the data they transmit (they share a session key).
  830. \item Alice sends a Begin cell along the circuit. It arrives at Bob's
  831. onion proxy. Bob's onion proxy connects to Bob's webserver.
  832. \item Data goes back and forth as usual.
  833. \end{tightlist}
  834. When establishing an introduction point, Bob provides the onion router
  835. with a public ``introduction'' key. The hash of this public key
  836. identifies a unique service, and (since Bob is required to sign his
  837. messages) prevents anybody else from usurping Bob's introduction point
  838. in the future. Bob uses the same public key when establish the other
  839. introduction points for that service.
  840. The blob that Alice gives the introduction point includes a hash of Bob's
  841. public key to identify the service, an optional initial authentication
  842. token (the introduction point can do prescreening, eg to block replays),
  843. and (encrypted to Bob's public key) the location of the meeting point,
  844. a meeting cookie Bob should tell the meeting point so he gets connected to
  845. Alice, an optional authentication token so Bob can choose whether to respond,
  846. and the first half of a DH key exchange. When Bob connects to the meeting
  847. place and gets connected to Alice's pipe, his first cell contains the
  848. other half of the DH key exchange.
  849. % briefly talk about our notion of giving cookies to people proportional
  850. % to how important they are, for location-protected servers hardened
  851. % against DDoS threat? -RD
  852. \subsection{Integration with user applications}
  853. For each service Bob offers, he configures his local onion proxy to know
  854. the local IP and port of the server, a strategy for authorizating Alices,
  855. and a public key. We assume the existence of a robust decentralized
  856. efficient lookup system which allows authenticated updates, eg
  857. \cite{cfs:sosp01}. (Each onion router could run a node in this lookup
  858. system; also note that as a stopgap measure, we can just run a simple
  859. lookup system on the directory servers.) Bob publishes into the DHT
  860. (indexed by the hash of the public key) the public key, an expiration
  861. time (``not valid after''), and the current introduction points for that
  862. service. Note that Bob's webserver is completely oblivious to the fact
  863. that it's hidden behind the Tor network.
  864. As far as Alice's experience goes, we require that her client interface
  865. remain a SOCKS proxy, and we require that she shouldn't have to modify
  866. her applications. Thus we encode all of the necessary information into
  867. the hostname (more correctly, fully qualified domain name) that Alice
  868. uses, eg when clicking on a url in her browser. Location-hidden services
  869. use the special top level domain called `.onion': thus hostnames take the
  870. form x.y.onion where x encodes the hash of PK, and y is the authentication
  871. cookie. Alice's onion proxy examines hostnames and recognizes when they're
  872. destined for a hidden server. If so, it decodes the PK and starts the
  873. rendezvous as described in the table above.
  874. \subsection{Previous rendezvous work}
  875. Ian Goldberg developed a similar notion of rendezvous points for
  876. low-latency anonymity systems \cite{ian-thesis}. His ``service tag''
  877. is the same concept as our ``hash of service's public key''. We make it
  878. a hash of the public key so it can be self-authenticating, and so the
  879. client can recognize the same service with confidence later on. His
  880. design differs from ours in the following ways though. Firstly, Ian
  881. suggests that the client should manually hunt down a current location of
  882. the service via Gnutella; whereas our use of the DHT makes lookup faster,
  883. more robust, and transparent to the user. Secondly, the client and server
  884. can share ephemeral DH keys, so at no point in the path is the plaintext
  885. exposed. Thirdly, our design is much more practical for deployment in a
  886. volunteer network, in terms of getting volunteers to offer introduction
  887. and meeting point services. The introduction points do not output any
  888. bytes to the clients. And the meeting points don't know the client,
  889. the server, or the stuff being transmitted. The indirection scheme
  890. is also designed with authentication/authorization in mind -- if the
  891. client doesn't include the right cookie with its request for service,
  892. the server doesn't even acknowledge its existence.
  893. \Section{Analysis}
  894. How well do we resist chosen adversary?
  895. How well do we meet stated goals?
  896. Mention jurisdictional arbitrage.
  897. Pull attacks and defenses into analysis as a subsection
  898. \Section{Maintaining anonymity in Tor}
  899. \label{sec:maintaining-anonymity}
  900. [Put as much of this as a part of open issues as is possible.]
  901. [what's an anonymity set?]
  902. packet counting attacks work great against initiators. need to do some
  903. level of obfuscation for that. standard link padding for passive link
  904. observers. long-range padding for people who own the first hop. are
  905. we just screwed against people who insert timing signatures into your
  906. traffic?
  907. Even regardless of link padding from Alice to the cloud, there will be
  908. times when Alice is simply not online. Link padding, at the edges or
  909. inside the cloud, does not help for this.
  910. how often should we pull down directories? how often send updated
  911. server descs?
  912. when we start up the client, should we build a circuit immediately,
  913. or should the default be to build a circuit only on demand? should we
  914. fetch a directory immediately?
  915. would we benefit from greater synchronization, to blend with the other
  916. users? would the reduced speed hurt us more?
  917. does the "you can't see when i'm starting or ending a stream because
  918. you can't tell what sort of relay cell it is" idea work, or is just
  919. a distraction?
  920. does running a server actually get you better protection, because traffic
  921. coming from your node could plausibly have come from elsewhere? how
  922. much mixing do you need before this is actually plausible, or is it
  923. immediately beneficial because many adversary can't see your node?
  924. do different exit policies at different exit nodes trash anonymity sets,
  925. or not mess with them much?
  926. do we get better protection against a realistic adversary by having as
  927. many nodes as possible, so he probably can't see the whole network,
  928. or by having a small number of nodes that mix traffic well? is a
  929. cascade topology a more realistic way to get defenses against traffic
  930. confirmation? does the hydra (many inputs, few outputs) topology work
  931. better? are we going to get a hydra anyway because most nodes will be
  932. middleman nodes?
  933. using a circuit many times is good because it's less cpu work.
  934. good because of predecessor attacks with path rebuilding.
  935. bad because predecessor attacks can be more likely to link you with a
  936. previous circuit since you're so verbose.
  937. bad because each thing you do on that circuit is linked to the other
  938. things you do on that circuit.
  939. how often to rotate?
  940. how to decide when to exit from middle?
  941. when to truncate and re-extend versus when to start new circuit?
  942. Because Tor runs over TCP, when one of the servers goes down it seems
  943. that all the circuits (and thus streams) going over that server must
  944. break. This reduces anonymity because everybody needs to reconnect
  945. right then (does it? how much?) and because exit connections all break
  946. at the same time, and it also reduces usability. It seems the problem
  947. is even worse in a p2p environment, because so far such systems don't
  948. really provide an incentive for nodes to stay connected when they're
  949. done browsing, so we would expect a much higher churn rate than for
  950. onion routing. Are there ways of allowing streams to survive the loss
  951. of a node in the path?
  952. discuss topologies. Cite George's non-freeroutes paper. Maybe this
  953. graf goes elsewhere.
  954. discuss attracting users; incentives; usability.
  955. Choosing paths and path lengths.
  956. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  957. \Section{Attacks and Defenses}
  958. \label{sec:attacks}
  959. Below we summarize a variety of attacks and how well our design withstands
  960. them.
  961. \begin{enumerate}
  962. \item \textbf{Passive attacks}
  963. \begin{itemize}
  964. \item \emph{Simple observation.}
  965. \item \emph{Timing correlation.}
  966. \item \emph{Size correlation.}
  967. \item \emph{Option distinguishability.}
  968. \end{itemize}
  969. \item \textbf{Active attacks}
  970. \begin{itemize}
  971. \item \emph{Key compromise.}
  972. \item \emph{Iterated subpoena.}
  973. \item \emph{Run recipient.}
  974. \item \emph{Run a hostile node.}
  975. \item \emph{Compromise entire path.}
  976. \item \emph{Selectively DoS servers.}
  977. \item \emph{Introduce timing into messages.}
  978. \item \emph{Tagging attacks.}
  979. the exit node can change the content you're getting to try to
  980. trick you. similarly, when it rejects you due to exit policy,
  981. it could give you a bad IP that sends you somewhere else.
  982. \end{itemize}
  983. \item \textbf{Directory attacks}
  984. \begin{itemize}
  985. \item foo
  986. \end{itemize}
  987. \end{enumerate}
  988. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  989. \Section{Future Directions and Open Problems}
  990. \label{sec:conclusion}
  991. % Mention that we need to do TCP over tor for reliability.
  992. Tor brings together many innovations into
  993. a unified deployable system. But there are still several attacks that
  994. work quite well, as well as a number of sustainability and run-time
  995. issues remaining to be ironed out. In particular:
  996. \begin{itemize}
  997. \item \emph{Scalability:} Since Tor's emphasis currently is on simplicity
  998. of design and deployment, the current design won't easily handle more
  999. than a few hundred servers, because of its clique topology. Restricted
  1000. route topologies \cite{danezis-pets03} promise comparable anonymity
  1001. with much better scaling properties, but we must solve problems like
  1002. how to randomly form the network without introducing net attacks.
  1003. % [cascades are a restricted route topology too. we must mention
  1004. % earlier why we're not satisfied with the cascade approach.]-RD
  1005. % [We do. At least
  1006. \item \emph{Cover traffic:} Currently we avoid cover traffic because
  1007. it introduces clear performance and bandwidth costs, but and its
  1008. security properties are not well understood. With more research
  1009. \cite{SS03,defensive-dropping}, the price/value ratio may change, both for
  1010. link-level cover traffic and also long-range cover traffic. In particular,
  1011. we expect restricted route topologies to reduce the cost of cover traffic
  1012. because there are fewer links to cover.
  1013. \item \emph{Better directory distribution:} Even with the threshold
  1014. directory agreement algorithm described in \ref{subsec:dirservers},
  1015. the directory servers are still trust bottlenecks. We must find more
  1016. decentralized yet practical ways to distribute up-to-date snapshots of
  1017. network status without introducing new attacks.
  1018. \item \emph{Implementing location-hidden servers:} While Section
  1019. \ref{sec:rendezvous} provides a design for rendezvous points and
  1020. location-hidden servers, this feature has not yet been implemented.
  1021. We will likely encounter additional issues, both in terms of usability
  1022. and anonymity, that must be resolved.
  1023. \item \emph{Wider-scale deployment:} The original goal of Tor was to
  1024. gain experience in deploying an anonymizing overlay network, and learn
  1025. from having actual users. We are now at the point where we can start
  1026. deploying a wider network. We will see what happens!
  1027. % ok, so that's hokey. fix it. -RD
  1028. \end{itemize}
  1029. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  1030. %\Section{Acknowledgments}
  1031. %% commented out for anonymous submission
  1032. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  1033. \bibliographystyle{latex8}
  1034. \bibliography{tor-design}
  1035. \end{document}
  1036. % Style guide:
  1037. % U.S. spelling
  1038. % avoid contractions (it's, can't, etc.)
  1039. % 'mix', 'mixes' (as noun)
  1040. % 'mix-net'
  1041. % 'mix', 'mixing' (as verb)
  1042. % 'Mixminion Project'
  1043. % 'Mixminion' (meaning the protocol suite or the network)
  1044. % 'Mixmaster' (meaning the protocol suite or the network)
  1045. % 'middleman' [Not with a hyphen; the hyphen has been optional
  1046. % since Middle English.]
  1047. % 'nymserver'
  1048. % 'Cypherpunk', 'Cypherpunks', 'Cypherpunk remailer'
  1049. % 'Onion Routing design', 'onion router' [note capitalization]
  1050. %
  1051. % 'Whenever you are tempted to write 'Very', write 'Damn' instead, so
  1052. % your editor will take it out for you.' -- Misquoted from Mark Twain