Daniel Forster wrote:

Hello Guys,

it would be great if I could get a few opinions regarding my upcoming master thesis topic.

My supervisor is Andriy Panchenko (you may know some of his work from Mike Perry's critique on website fingerprinting attacks). As a defense, we'd like to experiment with traffic splitting (like conflux- split traffic over multiple entry guards, but already merging at the middle relay) and padding.

I know that the no. of entry guards got decreased from three to one. May it be worth the research or is the approach heading in a not so great direction w.r.t. the Tor Project's "only one entry node" decision? Or, actually, what do you think in general..?

I think it will be interesting to see how a client of Tor can be fingerprinted by the guards chosen. In particular if the circuit length tends to be three and you perform a merge at the middle node. By watching the incoming n-tuple of guards, having chosen in advance the role of middle-hop, can clients be identified through correlation with exit traffic. I'm aware that the choice of guards can already make a client fingerprintable--but how much more so in this case. This might not be the adversary you're intending to address but is still a consequence. Unless I'm reading your proposal incorrectly.

How might the possible threat be addressed. Perhaps a more robust implementation of network coding and a revisit of circuit length. I'm just throwing out thoughts. I too am interested in the application of network coding to the goals of Tor. I'll be eagerly awaiting your results. Good luck and thanks.

-- leeroy