TorBricks: Blocking-Resistant Tor Bridge Distribution
Mahdi Zamani, Jared Saia, Jedidiah Crandall

TL;DR
TorBricks introduces a robust protocol for distributing Tor bridges that resists malicious users and preserves privacy, ensuring reliable anonymous access even under adversarial conditions.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel, scalable protocol for distributing Tor bridges resistant to malicious users and capable of privacy-preserving multi-distributor deployment.
Findings
Distributes O(t log n) bridges to resist malicious users
Guarantees high probability of connection after O(log t) rounds
Supports privacy-preserving distribution among multiple untrusted distributors
Abstract
Tor is currently the most popular network for anonymous Internet access. It critically relies on volunteer nodes called bridges for relaying Internet traffic when a user's ISP blocks connections to Tor. Unfortunately, current methods for distributing bridges are vulnerable to malicious users who obtain and block bridge addresses. In this paper, we propose TorBricks, a protocol for distributing Tor bridges to n users, even when an unknown number t < n of these users are controlled by a malicious adversary. TorBricks distributes O(tlog(n)) bridges and guarantees that all honest users can connect to Tor with high probability after O(log(t)) rounds of communication with the distributor. We also extend our algorithm to perform privacy-preserving bridge distribution when run among multiple untrusted distributors. This not only prevents the distributors from learning bridge addresses and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
