r13522@catbus: nickm | 2007-06-26 17:37:43 -0400

Add proposal 116 from Mike Lieberman: Two hop paths from entry guards.


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proposals/116-two-hop-paths-from-guard.txt

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+Filename: 116-two-hop-paths-from-guards.txt
+Title: Two hop paths from entry guards
+Version: $Revision: 13462 $
+Last-Modified: $Date: 2007-06-17T15:09:35.083173Z $
+Author: Michael Lieberman
+Created: 26-Jun-2007
+Status: Open
+
+This proposal is related to (but different from) Mike Perry's proposal 115
+"Two Hop Paths."
+
+Overview:
+
+Volunteers who run entry guards should have the option of using only 2
+additional tor nodes when constructing their own tor circuits.
+
+While the option of two hop paths should perhaps be extended to every client
+(as discussed in Mike Perry's thread), I believe the anonymity properties of
+two hop paths are particularly well-suited to client computers that are also
+serving as entry guards.
+
+First I will describe the details of the strategy, as well as possible
+avenues of attack. Then I will list advantages and disadvantages. Then, I
+will discuss some possibly safer variations of the strategy, and finally
+some implementation issues.
+
+Details:
+
+Suppose Alice is an entry guard, and wants to construct a two hop circuit.
+Alice chooses a middle node at random (not using the entry guard strategy),
+and gains anonymity by having her traffic look just like traffic from
+someone else using her as an entry guard.
+
+Can Alice's middle node figure out that she is initiator of the traffic? I
+can think of four possible approaches for distinguishing traffic from Alice
+with traffic through Alice:
+
+1) Notice that communication from Alice comes too fast: Experimentation is
+needed to determine if traffic from Alice can be distinguished from traffic
+from a computer with a decent link to Alice.
+
+2) Monitor Alice's network traffic to discover the lack of incoming packets
+at the appropriate times. If an adversary has this ability, then Alice
+already has problems in the current system, because the adversary can run a
+standard timing attack on Alice's traffic.
+
+3) Notice that traffic from Alice is unique in some way such that if Alice
+was just one of 3 entry guards for this traffic, then the traffic should be
+coming from two other entry guards as well. An example of "unique traffic"
+could be always sending 117 packets every 3 minutes to an exit node that
+exits to port 4661. However, if such patterns existed with sufficient
+precision, then it seems to me that Tor already has a problem. (This "unique
+traffic" may not be a problem if clients often end up choosing a single
+entry guard because their other two are down. Does anyone know if this is
+the case?)
+
+4) First, control the middle node *and* some other part of the traffic,
+using standard attacks on a two hop circuit without entry nodes (my recent
+paper on Browser-Based Attacks would work well for this
+http://petworkshop.org/2007/papers/PET2007_preproc_Browser_based.pdf). With
+control of the circuit, we can now cause "unique traffic" as in 3).
+Alternatively, if we know something about Alice independently, and we can
+see what websites are being visited, we might be able to guess that she is
+the kind of person that would visit those websites.
+
+Anonymity Advantages:
+
+-Alice never has the problem of choosing a malicious entry guard. In some
+sense, Alice acts as her own entry guard.
+
+Anonymity Disadvantages:
+
+-If Alice's traffic is identified as originating from herself (see above for
+how hard that might be), then she has the anonymity of a 2 hop circuit
+without entry guards.
+
+Additional advantages:
+
+-A discussion of the latency advantages of two hop circuits is going on in
+Mike Perry's thread already.
+-Also, we can advertise this change as "Run an entry guard and decrease your
+own Tor latency." This incentive has the potential to add nodes to the
+network, improving the network as a whole.
+
+Safer variations:
+
+To solve the "unique traffic" problem, Alice could use two hop paths only
+1/3 of the time, and choose 2 other entry guards for the other 2/3 of the
+time. All the advantages are now 1/3 as useful (possibly more, if the other
+2 entry guards are not always up).
+
+To solve the problem that Alice's responses are too fast, Alice could delay
+her responses (ideally based on some real data of response time when Alice
+is used an entry guard). This loses most of the speed advantages of the two
+hop path, but if Alice is a fast entry guard, it doesn't lose everything. It
+also still has the (arguable) anonymity advantage that Alice doesn't have to
+worry about having a malicious entry guard.
+
+Implementation details:
+For Alice to remain anonymous using this strategy, she has to actually be
+acting as an entry guard for other nodes. This means the two hop option can
+only be available to whatever high-performance threshold is currently set on
+entry guards. Alice may need to somehow check her own current status as an
+entry guard before choosing this two hop strategy.
+
+Another thing to consider: suppose Alice is also an exit node. If the
+fraction of exit nodes in existence is too small, she may rarely or never be
+chosen as an entry guard. It would be sad if we offered an incentive to run
+an entry guard that didn't extend to exit nodes. I suppose clients of Exit
+nodes could pull the same trick, and bypass using Tor altogether (zero hop
+paths), though that has additional issues.*
+
+Mike Lieberman
+MIT
+
+*Why we shouldn't recommend Exit nodes pull the same trick:
+1) Exit nodes would suffer heavily from the problem of "unique traffic"
+mentioned above.
+2) It would give governments an incentive to confiscate exit nodes to see if
+they are pulling this trick.