Building Incentives into Tor

Date
2008-11-12
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract

Distributed anonymous communication networks like Tor depend on volunteers to donate their resources. However, the efforts of Tor volunteers have not grown as fast as the demands on the Tor network. We explore techniques to incentivize Tor users to relay Tor traffic too; if users contribute resources to the Tor overlay, they should receive faster service in return. In our design, the central Tor directory authorities measure performance and publish a list of Tor relays that should be given higher priority when establishing circuits. Our system provides an acceptable anonymity tradeoff and improves performance while incentivizing Tor users, across the whole network, to contribute the resources necessary for Tor to better support its users’ needs. Simulations of our proposed design show that conforming users receive significant improvements in performance, in some cases experiencing twice the network throughput of selfish users who do not relay traffic for the Tor network.

Description
Advisor
Degree
Type
Technical report
Keywords
Citation

Dingledine, Roger, Ngan, Tsuen-Wan "Johnny" and Wallach, Dan S.. "Building Incentives into Tor." (2008) https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96371.

Has part(s)
Forms part of
Published Version
Rights
You are granted permission for the noncommercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, but this permission is only for a period of forty-five (45) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the Computer Science Department of Rice University under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).
Link to license
Citable link to this page