PTPerf: On the performance evaluation of Tor Pluggable Transports

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive performance comparison of 12 Tor pluggable transports, revealing variability in download times, reliability issues, and the influence of underlying primitives and access methods, aiding users in better PT selection.

Contribution

First systematic performance evaluation of 12 Tor pluggable transports, offering insights and recommendations to improve censorship circumvention strategies.

Findings

PT download times vary significantly under similar conditions.

Not all PTs are equally reliable, affecting censorship circumvention.

Performance depends on underlying communication primitives and access methods.

Abstract

Tor, one of the most popular censorship circumvention systems, faces regular blocking attempts by censors. Thus, to facilitate access, it relies on "pluggable transports" (PTs) that disguise Tor's traffic and make it hard for the adversary to block Tor. However, these are not yet well studied and compared for the performance they provide to the users. Thus, we conduct a first comparative performance evaluation of a total of 12 PTs -- the ones currently supported by the Tor project and those that can be integrated in the future. Our results reveal multiple facets of the PT ecosystem. (1) PTs' download time significantly varies even under similar network conditions. (2) All PTs are not equally reliable. Thus, clients who regularly suffer censorship may falsely believe that such PTs are blocked. (3) PT performance depends on the underlying communication primitive. (4) PTs performance significantly depends on the website access method (browser or command-line). Surprisingly, for some PTs, website access time was even less than vanilla Tor. Based on our findings from more than 1.25M measurements, we provide recommendations about selecting PTs and believe that our study can facilitate access for users who face censorship.