[tor-talk] New Astoria Tor client is said to be better than plain Tor

Rishab Nithyanand rishabn.uci at gmail.com
Fri May 22 21:26:18 UTC 2015


Hey Guys,

I'm one of the authors of Astoria. It's a very new system that tries to
improve the current Tor relay selection algorithm by using the
state-of-the-art in AS path inference and measurement tools to detect the
possibility of having the same AS on the paths between the (client, entry)
and (exit, destination).

Our evaluation shows that it does quite well to avoid asymmetric
correlation attacks, but the performance is a bit off from Tor (metric:
page load times for Alexa Top 100 from 10 countries).

But to be clear: the only thing changed is the entry and exit node
selection in the Tor circuit construction. We don't require any
modifications to the Tor eco-system and infrastructure.

Unlike previous AS aware clients, we also perform load balancing to not
overwhelm the slower relays, consider the case where it is impossible to
build any attacker-free circuits, and also consider that ASes from the same
organization might collude with each other.

This blew up less than 24 hours after updating our paper on Arxiv. We're
working on cleaning up the source code and will have it ready soon (about a
week).

Rishab


On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 5:08 PM, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:

> This story
> http://www.dailydot.com/politics/tor-astoria-timing-attack-client/ has
> been injected into all possible news streams today.
>
> Is there any merit to it?
>
> Yuri
> --
> tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> To unsubscribe or change other settings go to
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
>


More information about the tor-talk mailing list