Shedding Light on the Dark Corners of the Internet: A Survey of Tor Research

Saad Saleh*, Junaid Qadir, Muhammad U. Ilyas

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

35 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Anonymity services have seen high growth rates with increased usage in the past few years. Among various services, Tor is one of the most popular peer-to-peer anonymizing service. In this survey paper, we summarize, analyze, classify and quantify 26 years of research on the Tor network. Our research shows that ‘security’ and ‘anonymity’ are the most frequent keywords associated with Tor research studies. Quantitative analysis shows that the majority of research studies on Tor focus on ‘deanonymization’ the design of a breaching strategy. The second most frequent topic is analysis of path selection algorithms to select more resilient paths. Analysis shows that the majority of experimental studies derived their results by deploying private testbeds while others performed simulations by developing custom simulators. No consistent parameters have been used for Tor performance analysis. The majority of authors performed throughput and latency analysis.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-28
JournalJournal of Network and Computer Applications
Volume114
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul-2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Tor
  • Security
  • Anonymity
  • Deanonymization
  • Breaching
  • Path selection
  • Performance Analysis

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