Paper Info
Title
Exploring the potential benefits of expanded rate limiting in Tor: slow and steady wins the race with Tortoise
Abstract
Tor is a volunteer-operated network of application-layer relays that enables users to communicate privately and anonymously. Unfortunately, Tor often exhibits poor performance due to congestion caused by the unbalanced ratio of clients to available relays, as well as a disproportionately high consumption of network capacity by a small fraction of filesharing users. This paper argues the very counterintuitive notion that slowing down traffic on Tor will increase the bandwidth capacity of the network and consequently improve the experience of interactive web users. We introduce Tortoise, a system for rate limiting Tor at its ingress points. We demonstrate that Tortoise incurs little penalty for interactive web users, while significantly decreasing the throughput for filesharers. Our techniques provide incentives to filesharers to configure their Tor clients to also relay traffic, which in turn improves the network's overall performance. We present large-scale emulation results that indicate that interactive users will achieve a significant speedup if even a small fraction of clients opt to run relays.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2076732.2076762
ACSAC
Keywords
Field
DocType
network capacity,poor performance,small fraction,tor client,bandwidth capacity,interactive user,overall performance,potential benefit,volunteer-operated network,steady win,interactive web user,expanded rate,application-layer relay,rate limiting,performance,anonymity
Incentive,Computer security,Computer science,Bandwidth (signal processing),Emulation,Anonymity,Throughput,Limiting,Relay,Speedup
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.55
20
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
W. Brad Moore1171.49
Chris Wacek21194.79
Micah Sherr362544.49