Android Tor Tribler Tunneling (AT3)

Abstract

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 libraries to the ARM CPU architecture is uncharted territory. We have successfully ported all dependencies of Tribler to Android. An application called Android Tor Tribler Tunneling (AT3) has been developed that tests whether these libraries work. This application downloads a test torrent and measures information such as CPU usage and download speed. Based on this information we have concluded that it is currently not viable to run the anonymous tunnels on an Android smartphone. Creating circuits with several hops that use encryption is very computationally expensive and modern smartphones can hardly keep up. By using optimized cryptographic libraries such as gmp or with the recently announced ARMv8 architecture which supports hardware-accelerated AES encryption, creating such circuits might become possible.