Improving the Security of Anonymity Networks by Leveraging the "Location" Attribute in Online Social Networks

Abstract

The motivation of this project relies on improving the security of the anonymity network Tor. Tor is an online software that allows users to browse the Internet anonymously by directing their Internet traffic through three randomly chosen intermediate proxies, from a list of around 5,000 volunteer-run relays. Tor is one of the most popular anonymity networks, but it has a number of vulnerabilities, and is sensitive to end-to-end correlation attacks. To prevent against this kind of attacks, we propose a method that expands the network and then chooses the intermediate proxies from a longer list of trusted relays. For this we leverage online social networks, and use user's friends, and the friends of their friends, etc. for routing the traffic. Location is important because the chances that these friends share the same location with the user are high. This allows adversaries to monitor the traffic in smaller areas and easily identify who is communicating with whom. However, if the chosen proxies are not in the same region, the set of relays that will forward the traffic will consist of more trusted proxies, and the chances of being tracked will be lower.