Exploring Deployment Strategies for the Tor Network

摘要

In response to upcoming performance and security challenges of anonymity networks like Tor, it will be of crucial importance to be able to develop and deploy performance improvements and state-of-the-art countermeasures. In this paper, we therefore explore different deployment strategies and review their applicability, impact, and risks to the Tor network. In a simulation-based evaluation, which leverages historical data of Tor, we show that the deployment strategies can practically be applied to realize significant protocol changes in Tor. Our results, however, also indicate that during the transitional phase a certain degradation of anonymity is unavoidable.