Large-Scale Emulation of Anonymous Communication Networks
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Date
2014-08-15
Authors
Singh, Sukhbir
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Tor is the most popular low-latency anonymous communication system for the Internet,
helping people to protect their privacy online and circumvent Internet censorship. Its low-
latency anonymity and distributed design present a variety of open research questions
related to — but not limited to — anonymity, performance, and scalability, that have
generated considerable interest in the research community. Testing changes to the design
of the protocol or studying attacks against it in the live network is undesirable as doing so
can invade the privacy of users and even put them in harm’s way. Traditional Tor research
has been limited to emulating a few hundred nodes with the ModelNet network emulator,
or, simulating thousands of nodes with the Shadow discrete-event simulator, both of which
may not accurately represent the real-world Tor network. We present SNEAC (Scalable
Network Emulator for Anonymous Communication; pronounced "sneak"), a large-scale
network emulator that allows us to emulate a network with thousands of nodes. Our hope
is that with such large-scale experimentation, we can more closely emulate the live Tor
network with half a million users.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science, Tor, Privacy, Censorship Resistance