The Road Not Taken: Re-thinking the Feasibility of Voice Calling Over Tor

TL;DR

This extensive empirical study demonstrates that Tor can support high-quality anonymous VoIP calls in most cases, challenging prior assumptions about its unsuitability for real-time communication.

Contribution

The paper provides the first comprehensive, real-world performance analysis of VoIP over Tor, showing its feasibility with current network conditions and infrastructure.

Findings

Over 85% of cases support good voice quality over Tor

Most Tor relays have sufficient bandwidth for low-rate VoIP

Cross-traffic contention generally does not hinder VoIP performance

Abstract

Anonymous VoIP calls over the Internet holds great significance for privacy-conscious users, whistle-blowers and political activists alike. Prior research deems popular anonymization systems like Tor unsuitable for providing requisite performance guarantees that real-time applications like VoIP need. Their claims are backed by studies that may no longer be valid due to constant advancements in Tor. Moreover, we believe that these studies lacked the requisite diversity and comprehensiveness. Thus, conclusions from these studies led them to propose novel and tailored solutions. However, no such system is available for immediate use. Additionally, operating such new systems would incur significant costs for recruiting users and volunteered relays, to provide the necessary anonymity guarantees. It thus becomes imperative that the exact performance of VoIP over Tor be quantified and analyzed so that the potential performance bottlenecks can be amended. We thus conducted an extensive empirical study across various in-lab and real-world scenarios to shed light on VoIP performance over Tor. In over 0.5 million measurements spanning 12 months, across seven countries and covering about 6650 Tor relays, we observed that Tor supports good voice quality (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) >3 and oneway delay <400ms) in more than 85% of cases. Further analysis indicates that in general for most Tor relays, the contentions due to cross-traffic were low enough to support VoIP calls, that are anyways transmitted at low rates (<120 Kbps). Our findings are supported by concordant measurements using iperf that show more than the adequate available bandwidth for most cases. Data published by the Tor Metrics also corroborates the same. Hence, unlike prior efforts, our research reveals that Tor is suitable for supporting anonymous VoIP calls.