Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
The utility of anonymous communication is un- dermined by a growing number of websites treating users of such services in a degraded fashion. The second-class treatment of anonymous users ranges from outright rejection to limiting their access to a subset of the serviceu0027s functionality or imposing hurdles such as CAPTCHA-solving. To date, the observation of such practices has relied upon anecdotal reports catalogued by frustrated anonymity users. We present a study to methodically enumerate and characterize, in the context of Tor, the treatment of anonymous users as second-class Web citizens. We focus on first-line blocking: at the transport layer, through reset or dropped connections; and at the application layer, through explicit blocks served from website home pages. Our study draws upon several data sources: comparisons of Internet- wide port scans from Tor exit nodes versus from control hosts; scans of the home pages of top-1,000 Alexa websites through every Tor exit; and analysis of nearly a year of historic HTTP crawls from Tor network and control hosts. We develop a methodology to distinguish censorship events from incidental failures such as those caused by packet loss or network outages, and incorporate consideration of the endemic churn in web-accessible services over both time and geographic diversity. We find clear evidence of Tor blocking on the Web, including 3.67% of the top-1,000 Alexa sites. Some blocks specifically target Tor, while others result from fate-sharing when abuse-based automated blockers trigger due to misbehaving Web sessions sharing the same exit node. |
Year | Venue | Field |
|---|---|---|
2016 | NDSS | Application layer,Internet privacy,Censorship,Computer science,Computer security,Packet loss,Transport layer,Anonymity,Limiting,The Internet |
DocType | Citations | PageRank |
Conference | 12 | 0.65 |
References | Authors | |
6 | 8 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheharbano Khattak | 1 | 74 | 5.32 |
| David Fifield | 2 | 34 | 2.32 |
| Sadia Afroz | 3 | 20 | 2.16 |
| Mobin Javed | 4 | 118 | 11.18 |
| Srikanth Sundaresan | 5 | 13 | 1.00 |
| damon mccoy | 6 | 2073 | 125.49 |
| Vern Paxson | 7 | 14031 | 2130.20 |
| Steven J. Murdoch | 8 | 806 | 57.90 |