Multipathing Traffic to Reduce Entry Node Exposure in Onion Routing

Abstract

Users of an onion routing network, such as Tor, depend on its anonymity properties. However, especially malicious entry nodes, which know the client’s identity, can also observe the whole communication on their link to the client and, thus, conduct several de-anonymization attacks. To limit this exposure and to impede corresponding attacks, we propose to multipath traffic between the client and the middle node to reduce the information an attacker can obtain at a single vantage point. To facilitate the deployment, only clients and selected middle nodes need to implement our approach, which works transparently for the remaining legacy nodes. Furthermore, we let clients control the splitting strategy to prevent any external manipulation.

Dr. rer. nat. Jan Pennekamp

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr. Jens Hiller

Sebastian Reuter

Wladimir De La Cadena

Asya Mitseva

Dr. Martin Henze

Thomas Engel

Klaus Wehrle

Head of Group

Andriy Panchenko