Forming Guard Sets using AS Relationships
Mohsen Imani, Armon Barton, and Matthew Wright

TL;DR
This paper introduces a location-based guard set formation method for Tor that enhances security by limiting malicious guard influence and improves stability compared to bandwidth-based approaches.
Contribution
We propose a novel Internet location-based guard set formation method that improves security and stability over existing bandwidth-based guard sets.
Findings
Our approach confines adversaries to fewer guard sets.
Simulation shows improved security against relay and network adversaries.
Guard set stability is enhanced with location-based grouping.
Abstract
The mechanism for picking guards in Tor suffers from security problems like guard fingerprinting and from performance issues. To address these issues, Hayes and Danezis proposed the use of guard sets, in which the Tor system groups all guards into sets, and each client picks one of these sets and uses its guards. Unfortunately, guard sets frequently need nodes added or they are broken up due to fluctuations in network bandwidth. In this paper, we first show that these breakups create opportunities for malicious guards to join many guard sets by merely tuning the bandwidth they make available to Tor, and this greatly increases the number of clients exposed to malicious guards. To address this problem, we propose a new method for forming guard sets based on Internet location. We construct a hierarchy that keeps clients and guards together more reliably and prevents guards from easily…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
