Impact of replacing TCP by QUIC in Tor on website fingerprinting resistance

Privacy is a human right, yet, people’s behavior on the web is constantly tracked. Tor, an anonymity network, is an effective defence against tracking. However, Tor’s multiplexing of logically independent data streams into a single TCP connection causes issues. Tor with QUIC has been implemented as an alternative with better performance but it...

Measuring Polkadot: The Impact of Tor and a VPN on Polkadot's Performance and Security

Begun in 2020, Polkadot is one of the largest blockchains in market capitalization and development. However, privacy on the Polkadot network has yet to be one of the key focus points. Especially unlinkability between the user’s IP address and Polkadot address is essential. Without this unlinkability, users are vulnerable to targeted ads,...

Tor over QUIC

Tor is the most popular tool for anonymous online communication. However, the performance of Tor's volunteer-run network is suboptimal when network congestion occurs. Within Tor, many connections are multiplexed over a single TCP connection between relays, which causes a head-of-line blocking problem, degrading relay performance. In this thesis,...

Measuring accessibility of popular websites while using Tor

Tor is an anonymity network used by a vast number of users in order to protect their privacy on the internet. It should not come as a surprise that this service is also used for abuse such as Denial of service attacks and other malicious activities because of the anonymity it provides. For protecting themselves from this abuse, websites block...

Adding QUIC support to the Tor network

Privacy in the Internet is under attack by governments and companies indiscriminately spying on everyone. The anonymity network Tor is a solution to restore some privacy, however, Tor is slow in both bandwidth and latency. It uses a TCP-based connection to multiplex different circuits between nodes and this causes different independent circuits...

Understanding the Topological Structure and Semantic Content of Darknet Communities

For over a decade Darknet has been gaining tremendous popularity proportional to the growing concerns fostered by lack of anonymity and privacy on the World Wide Web. In the recent years, illegitimate use of the Darknet has resulted into investigation in the research community that is analogous to a domino effect further adding to popularity of...

Multi-core architecture for anonymous Internet streaming

There are two key components for high throughput distributed anonymizing applications. The first key component is overhead due to message complexity of the utilized algorithms. The second key component is an nonscalable architecture to deal with this high throughput. These issues are compounded by the need for anonymization. Using a state of the...

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...

Anonymous Internet: Anonymizing peer-to-peer traffic using applied cryptography

Throughout the years the Internet became of indispensable value to social, economic and political life. Despite this, the Internet in all its forms and protocols has proven to be extremely sensitive to manipulation by forces in control of the infrastructure of the Internet. Along with the growth of The Internet came the growth of censorship and...

Anonymous HD video streaming

No scalable privacy-enhancing technologies exists that is capable of anonymous HD video streaming. Our paper discusses the new anonymizer built into Tribler, a social content-sharing client. With anonymous HD-video streaming as the main objective requirements as at least 10 Mbit/s throughput, user bandwidth donations and NAT-traversal are...

Android Tor Tribler Tunneling (AT3): TI3800 Bachelorproject

Tribler is a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system. Recently the Tribler development team has introduced anonymous internet communication using a Tor-like protocol in their trial version. The goal of our bachelor project is to port this technology to Android devices. This is a challenging task because cross-compiling the necessary...

Towards an architecture of experience

Many urban and architectural designs bring about a different experience in its visitors than the designer originally intended. Typical architectural qualities such as ‘dynamism’, ‘harmony‘, ‘lightness’ are often guiding themes in the de- sign, but hardly ever experienced in reality when the design has been built. Especially the notorious grand...