My name is Nima Azizzadeh and I'm a second year of mastering Cyber Security major at University of Tehran, Iran. I am extremely interested in pursuing independent research. An extensive research experience will greatly help me consolidate my future career choice.

Recently I'm interested in tor project vulnerabilities and I looked at some papers about it. This paper "The Effect of DNS on Tor’s Anonymity, NDSS, February 2017" attracted a great deal of my attention. A lot of research has gone into improving the Tor network, but its use of DNS has received little attention. In this research project, they set out to learn how DNS can harm the anonymity of Tor users, and how adversaries can leverage the DNS protocol to deanonymize users. They studied (i) how exposed the DNS protocol is compared to web traffic, (ii) how Tor exit relays are configured to use DNS, (iii) how existing website fingerprinting attacks can be enhanced with DNS, and (iv) how effective these enhanced website fingerprinting attacks are at Internet-scale.

Also, I found another project that I think can defend against these attacks to some degree. The project is T-DNS (Connection-Oriented DNS to Improve Privacy and Security - DNS over TCP and TLS). It combines TCP to smoothly support large payloads and mitigate spoofing and amplification for DoS. T-DNS uses transport-layer security (TLS) to provide privacy from users to their DNS resolvers and optionally to authoritative servers.