On Identifying Anomalies in Tor Usage with Applications in Detecting Internet Censorship

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to detect and rank anomalies in Tor network usage, serving as an early warning system for internet censorship events, applicable to other services and data sources.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel anomaly detection approach that identifies contiguous anomalous periods and ranks countries by deviation, with a practical implementation used since 2016.

Findings

Successfully identified known censorship events

Enabled early detection of anomalous Tor usage patterns

Demonstrated applicability to multiple data sources

Abstract

We develop a means to detect ongoing per-country anomalies in the daily usage metrics of the Tor anonymous communication network, and demonstrate the applicability of this technique to identifying likely periods of internet censorship and related events. The presented approach identifies contiguous anomalous periods, rather than daily spikes or drops, and allows anomalies to be ranked according to deviation from expected behaviour. The developed method is implemented as a running tool, with outputs published daily by mailing list. This list highlights per-country anomalous Tor usage, and produces a daily ranking of countries according to the level of detected anomalous behaviour. This list has been active since August 2016, and is in use by a number of individuals, academics, and NGOs as an early warning system for potential censorship events. We focus on Tor, however the presented approach is more generally applicable to usage data of other services, both individually and in combination. We demonstrate that combining multiple data sources allows more specific identification of likely Tor blocking events. We demonstrate the our approach in comparison to existing anomaly detection tools, and against both known historical internet censorship events and synthetic datasets. Finally, we detail a number of significant recent anomalous events and behaviours identified by our tool.