QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol
In the past decades, the internet has emerged as the fastest way to access information. However, this revolutionary information age comes with its own set of challenges. The privacy of Internet users is at increasing risk with the advances in surveillance techniques. Users' online behavior, act...
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doaj-d1394529da3a46ed995a747fa72df7692021-03-30T15:22:55ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362021-01-019287692878410.1109/ACCESS.2021.30596729354777QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport ProtocolLamiaa Basyoni0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0243-5484Aiman Erbad1https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7565-5253Mashael Alsabah2Noora Fetais3https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3609-2659Amr Mohamed4https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1583-7503Mohsen Guizani5https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8972-8094Kindi Research Center, College of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, QatarDivision of Information and Computing Technology, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation, Doha, QatarQatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation, Doha, QatarDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, QatarDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, QatarDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, QatarIn the past decades, the internet has emerged as the fastest way to access information. However, this revolutionary information age comes with its own set of challenges. The privacy of Internet users is at increasing risk with the advances in surveillance techniques. Users' online behavior, activities, and even personal information are being tracked by ISPs and major tech companies. In response to the increasing need for preserving and protecting the privacy of online users, anonymity networks were developed. Tor anonymity network is a low-latency anonymity network that has gained quite a good reputation over the past years and is being adopted by thousands of users. With the great attention Tor's network is getting, the original design of Tor was proven to have performance limiting issues. With the motivation for addressing the performance limitation in Tor, we present QuicTor, a datagram-based design to solve Tor's transport-layer limiting issue. We evaluated the performance of QuicTor in comparison to vanilla Tor as well as other performance-enhancing proposals. QuicTor achieved significant performance improvements for interactive applications as well as streaming applications. Running Tor over a datagram-based protocol entails a careful security analysis. In this article, we assess the behavior of QuicTor under side-channel attacks aiming to de-anonymize Tor's clients. We show that the performance improvements brought by QuicTor do not reduce the anonymity of clients under the investigated types of attacks.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9354777/Privacyanonymitytortransport protocolsQUIC |
collection |
DOAJ |
language |
English |
format |
Article |
sources |
DOAJ |
author |
Lamiaa Basyoni Aiman Erbad Mashael Alsabah Noora Fetais Amr Mohamed Mohsen Guizani |
spellingShingle |
Lamiaa Basyoni Aiman Erbad Mashael Alsabah Noora Fetais Amr Mohamed Mohsen Guizani QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol IEEE Access Privacy anonymity tor transport protocols QUIC |
author_facet |
Lamiaa Basyoni Aiman Erbad Mashael Alsabah Noora Fetais Amr Mohamed Mohsen Guizani |
author_sort |
Lamiaa Basyoni |
title |
QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol |
title_short |
QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol |
title_full |
QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol |
title_fullStr |
QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol |
title_full_unstemmed |
QuicTor: Enhancing Tor for Real-Time Communication Using QUIC Transport Protocol |
title_sort |
quictor: enhancing tor for real-time communication using quic transport protocol |
publisher |
IEEE |
series |
IEEE Access |
issn |
2169-3536 |
publishDate |
2021-01-01 |
description |
In the past decades, the internet has emerged as the fastest way to access information. However, this revolutionary information age comes with its own set of challenges. The privacy of Internet users is at increasing risk with the advances in surveillance techniques. Users' online behavior, activities, and even personal information are being tracked by ISPs and major tech companies. In response to the increasing need for preserving and protecting the privacy of online users, anonymity networks were developed. Tor anonymity network is a low-latency anonymity network that has gained quite a good reputation over the past years and is being adopted by thousands of users. With the great attention Tor's network is getting, the original design of Tor was proven to have performance limiting issues. With the motivation for addressing the performance limitation in Tor, we present QuicTor, a datagram-based design to solve Tor's transport-layer limiting issue. We evaluated the performance of QuicTor in comparison to vanilla Tor as well as other performance-enhancing proposals. QuicTor achieved significant performance improvements for interactive applications as well as streaming applications. Running Tor over a datagram-based protocol entails a careful security analysis. In this article, we assess the behavior of QuicTor under side-channel attacks aiming to de-anonymize Tor's clients. We show that the performance improvements brought by QuicTor do not reduce the anonymity of clients under the investigated types of attacks. |
topic |
Privacy anonymity tor transport protocols QUIC |
url |
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9354777/ |
work_keys_str_mv |
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