Improved identity anonymization using hashed-TOR network

Abstract

At present, the modern world has been computerized to a huge extent because of the increasing penetration of the Internet. There is a plethora of services available on the web platform these days. Services available may be either legitimate or illegitimate. International borders have been effectively eliminated with the help of the internet and so more and more companies are offering their services across the globe. The physical location of the service provider does not matter anymore. Since every request that is sent to the WWW, every message that is relayed and, in fact, every click is logged somewhere on the internet, it gives rise to a huge knowledge base of user data. This knowledge base can be manipulated and exploited in a number of ways. This poses a great threat to any individual user who wants to utilize the services available on the internet anonymously. A mechanism is required using which individuals can maintain their own privacy from global organizations such as the NSA, Google, etc., which are believed to collect huge amounts of personal user data. The TOR network goes a long way in doing that and abstracts the user from the conventional internet. But TOR itself is not free from vulnerabilities. In this paper, a vulnerability with the ONION routing protocol, which is the spine of the TOR network, has been presented. It has been analyzed and a technique to overcome it has also been discussed to make the TOR network safer for anonymous use on the World Wide Web.