BitTorrent file sharing using Tor-like hidden services

The Internet is a large public network of networks and computers. When no countermeasures are taken, all information and activities taking place on the public Internet are subject to traffic analysis, threatening personal freedom and privacy. The first measure to take is securing all transferred information by applying encryption on it, which makes it at least very hard to tap the contents of the transferred information. But encryption does not add any value when it comes to anonymity. Although the contents of the message are not known (because it is encrypted), it is still possible to track down where a message comes from, and where it is going to by analyzing the network infrastructure. Governments or Internet providers may apply censorship or block any kind of network traffic coming or going from somewhere. This is where hidden services come in. The idea of hidden services was described by the authors of Tor (The onion router). The hidden services protocol hides the location of both the sender and receiver by transferring and encrypting messages over multiple hops, without revealing the true identity or contents of the messages in transit. This thesis proposes a design for implementing Tor-like hidden services in a decentralized peer-to-peer system, enabling the possibility of downloading and seeding anonymously. A proof-of-concept will be implemented into Tribler, a BitTorrent client developed at Delft University of Technology. Tribler already supports anonymous downloading using encryption over circuits with multiple hops, but to make hidden services work, an end-to-end encrypted circuit between both the seeder and downloader needs to be established. This is not as easy as it seems, because the seeder and downloader do not know each other. The implementation details of hidden services are part of this work, as well as experiments on the performance of the system. Furthermore, a number of issues related to transforming the original idea of hidden services into a fully distributed context are solved.

Subject

hidden services
tor
anonymity
anonymous
onion routing
peer to peer

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http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:98728747-571c-4df8-ac88-f5b5cf19626c

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Student theses

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master thesis

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thesis-20150823.pdf

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