Securing anonymous communication channels under the selective DoS attack

Abstract

Anonymous communication systems are subject to selective denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Selective DoS attacks lower anonymity as they force paths to be rebuilt multiple times to ensure delivery, which increases the opportunity for more attack. We present a detection algorithm that filters out compromised communication channels for one of the most widely used anonymity networks, Tor. Our detection algorithm uses two levels of probing to filter out potentially compromised tunnels. We probabilistically analyze our detection algorithm and show its robustness against selective DoS attacks through simulation. We also analyze the overhead of our algorithm and show that we can achieve better security guarantee than the conventional Tor path selection algorithm, while adding only approximately 5% bandwidth overhead to the Tor network. Finally, we validate our design with experiments using the live Tor network. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.