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[tor-commits] [tech-reports/master] Add measuring-safety-tor-network blog post.
commit e9ac86277a7f14a324fcd1fd0c44cc98d74c8c75
Author: Karsten Loesing <karsten.loesing@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wed Aug 8 20:17:09 2012 +0200
Add measuring-safety-tor-network blog post.
---
2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/.gitignore | 3 +
.../measuring-safety-tor-network.bib | 39 +++
.../measuring-safety-tor-network.tex | 261 ++++++++++++++++++++
2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/tortechrep.cls | 1 +
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+measuring-safety-tor-network.pdf
+measuring-safety-tor-network-2011-02-06.pdf
+
diff --git a/2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/measuring-safety-tor-network.bib b/2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/measuring-safety-tor-network.bib
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+@inproceedings{feamster:wpes2004,
+ title = {Location Diversity in Anonymity Networks},
+ author = {Nick Feamster and Roger Dingledine},
+ booktitle = {{Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES
+ 2004)}},
+ year = {2004},
+ month = {October},
+ address = {Washington, DC, USA},
+ note = {\url{http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#feamster:wpes2004}},
+}
+
+@inproceedings{EdmanS09,
+ title = {{AS}-awareness in {Tor} path selection},
+ author = {Matthew Edman and Paul F. Syverson},
+ booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications
+ Security, CCS 2009, Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 9-13, 2009},
+ year = {2009},
+ pages = {380--389},
+ editor = {Ehab Al-Shaer and Somesh Jha and Angelos D. Keromytis},
+ publisher = {ACM},
+ isbn = {978-1-60558-894-0},
+ note = {\url{http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#DBLP:conf:ccs:EdmanS09}},
+}
+
+@inproceedings{SherrBL09,
+ title = {Scalable Link-Based Relay Selection for Anonymous Routing},
+ author = {Micah Sherr and Matt Blaze and Boon Thau Loo},
+ booktitle = {Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 9th International Symposium,
+ PETS 2009, Seattle, WA, USA, August 5-7, 2009},
+ volume = {5672},
+ year = {2009},
+ pages = {73--93},
+ editor = {Ian Goldberg and Mikhail J. Atallah},
+ publisher = {Springer},
+ series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
+ isbn = {978-3-642-03167-0},
+ note = {\url{http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#DBLP:conf:pet:SherrBL09}},
+}
+
diff --git a/2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/measuring-safety-tor-network.tex b/2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/measuring-safety-tor-network.tex
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+\documentclass{tortechrep}
+\usepackage{enumerate}
+\begin{document}
+
+\author{Roger Dingledine}
+\contact{arma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx}
+\reportid{2011-02-001}
+\date{February 6, 2011}
+\title{Measuring the safety of the Tor network}
+\maketitle
+
+\setcounter{section}{-1}
+\section{Introduction}
+
+We need a better understanding of how much anonymity the Tor network
+provides against a partial network adversary who observes and/or operates
+some of the network.
+Specifically, we want to understand the chances that this class of
+adversary can observe a user's traffic coming into the network and also
+the corresponding traffic exiting the network.
+
+Most of our graphs historically have looked at the total number of relays
+over time.
+But this simple scalar doesn't take into account relay capacity, exit
+policies, geographic or network location, etc.
+
+One concrete problem from this bad metric is that when many new relays
+show up (e.g.\ due to a political event%
+\footnote{\url{https://blog.torproject.org/files/relays-diff-2011-01-28.png}}),
+we really don't have any insight about how the diversity of the new relays
+compares to the rest of the network.
+The simplistic metric also gets misused in academic research papers to
+produce misleading results like ``I can sign up 2\% of the Tor relays and
+capture 50\% of the paths,'' when what they mean is ``I can provide half
+the capacity in the Tor network and capture half the paths.''
+
+There are four parts to this research problem.
+First, we need a broad array of metrics that reflect various instances of
+our partial network adversary.
+Second, we need to understand for each metric how stable it is
+(sensitivity analysis) and what changes in the Tor network would
+efficiently improve (or harm) it.
+Third, we should make the calculations as realistic as possible based on
+actual Tor client behavior.
+Last, we need a better infrastructure for comparing the safety impact from
+alternate design scenarios, for example different path selection or route
+balancing algorithms.
+
+We'd love to work with you%
+\footnote{\url{https://www.torproject.org/research}}
+to help answer these questions.
+
+\section{Part one: new metrics}
+
+The network graphs%
+\footnote{\url{https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html}}
+on our metrics site show the number of relays and advertised capacity over
+time.
+More importantly, we've archived all the relay descriptors and network
+consensus documents%
+\footnote{\url{https://metrics.torproject.org/data.html\#relaydesc}}
+going back to 2004.
+So now we can ask some questions to better capture the safety of the
+network over time.
+
+What is the entropy of path selection over time?
+When we add really fast relays, the capacity of the network goes up but
+the safety of the network can go down because it gets less balanced.
+We can start with a simple approximation of a Tor client's path selection
+behavior---e.g., choose the first hop randomly weighted by bandwidth, and
+choose the final hop randomly weighted by bandwidth from among the nodes
+that can exit to port 80.
+I'm particularly interested in the entropy of the first hop and the third
+hop, since those are the key points for the anonymity Tor provides against
+a partial network adversary.
+Calculating entropy on the probability distribution of possible first hops
+is easy (as is last hops), and it's worth looking at these individual
+components so we have better intuition about where our anonymity comes
+from.
+Then we'd also want to look at the unified metric (probability
+distribution of first cross last), which in the simple approximation is
+the sum of the two entropies.
+
+Then we should do the same entropy calculations, but lumping relays
+together based on various shared characteristics.
+For example, country diversity: what's the entropy of path selection over
+time when you treat all relays in Germany as one big relay, all relays in
+France as one big relay, etc?
+How about autonomous system (AS)%
+\footnote{\url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous\_system\_\%28Internet\%29}}
+based diversity, where all the relays in AT\&T's network are lumped
+together?
+
+Another angle to evaluate is what expected fraction of paths have the
+first and last hop in the same country, or the same AS, or the same city,
+or the same continent.
+What expected fraction of paths cross at least one ocean?
+How about looking at the AS-level paths \emph{between} relays, like the
+research from Feamster \cite{feamster:wpes2004} or Edman \cite{EdmanS09}?
+What user locations are more safe or less safe in the above metrics?
+
+It's plausible to imagine we can also gain some intuition when looking at
+the \emph{possible diversity} rather than the entropy.
+How many ASes or countries total are represented in the network at a given
+time?
+
+The goal here isn't to come up with the one true metric for summarizing
+Tor's safety.
+Rather, we need to recognize that there are many threat models to consider
+at once, so we need many different views into what types of safety the
+network can offer.
+
+\section{Part two: how robust are these metrics?}
+
+For each of the above metrics, how stable are they when you add or remove
+a few relays?
+Are certain relays critical to the safety of the Tor network?
+One way to look at this question is to graph the fall-off of safety as you
+remove relays from the network, in one case choosing victims randomly and
+in another choosing them to optimally harm the network.
+In the latter case, I expect it will look pretty dire.
+Then look at the same scenario, but now look at the safety of the network
+as you remove \emph{capacity} from the network.
+For example, consider that the adversary's cost of removing a relay is
+equal to its capacity.
+Then explore these attacks again, but rather than looking at attacking
+individual relays look at attacks on ASes, countries, or continents.
+
+Then look at the robustness over time: is an adversary that can knock out
+X\% of the capacity in the network (for various values of X) getting more
+or less influential as the network grows?
+How about an adversary who can knock out an absolute capacity of K bytes
+for various values of K?
+
+From the other direction, are there certain geographic or network
+locations where adding relays with a given capacity will most influence
+your safety metrics?
+This influence could be positive (``where should I put my relay to best
+help the Tor network?'') or negative (``where should I put my relay to
+best attack users?'').
+
+Is there any relationship between the rate of new relay arrival
+(e.g.\ during political events or after popular conferences) and the level
+of diversity of these relays?
+
+\section{Part three: how good was the simple approximation?}
+
+While the above calculations assume a simplified path selection model, the
+reality%
+\footnote{\url{https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/path-spec.txt}}
+is more complex.
+Clients avoid using more than one relay from a given ``/16'' network or
+family%
+\footnote{\url{https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq\#ManyRelays}}
+in their paths.
+They only use relays with the Guard flag%
+\footnote{\url{https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq\#EntryGuards}}%
+$^{,}$%
+\footnote{\url{https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/dir-spec.txt}}
+for their first hop.
+They read weighting parameters from the consensus and use them to avoid
+Guard-flagged nodes for positions other than the first hop and avoid
+Exit-flagged nodes for positions other than the last hop, in proportion to
+how much capacity is available in each category.
+They track how long it takes them to build circuits, and preemptively
+discard the slowest 20\% of their paths.
+
+Accounting for all of these behaviors (especially the last one) will be
+hard, and you'll want to work closely with the Tor developers to make sure
+you're moving in the right direction.
+But even if you don't handle all of them, having a more realistic sense of
+how clients behave should allow you to better capture the safety in the
+live Tor network.
+If you want extra feedback, you can compare your path selection
+predictions with paths that Tor chooses in practice%
+\footnote{\url{https://metrics.torproject.org/data/moria-50kb.extradata}}
+(full data here%
+\footnote{\url{https://metrics.torproject.org/data.html\#performance}}).
+
+We should rerun the above experiments with the more accurate client
+behavior, and see if any of the results change substantially, and if so,
+why.
+These changes are great places to recognize and reconsider tradeoffs
+between what we should do for maximum safety according to these metrics vs
+what we should do to optimize other metrics like performance and
+vulnerability to other attacks.
+Some of these differences are intentional; for example, we don't give the
+Guard flag to every relay because we want to reduce the churn of entry
+guards.
+But others are due to design mistakes; for example, we are probably not
+giving the Guard flag out as broadly as we should, and I imagine that
+really hurts the network's safety.
+
+How far away is the ``optimal'' approximation curve you produced in part
+one from the ``in practice'' curve here?
+How does the divergence from the optimal look over time?
+That is, were we at 50\% of optimal back in 2007, but now we're only at
+20\%?
+
+\section{Part four: consider alternate designs}
+
+Once we've looked at how safe the Tor network has been over time for our
+broad array of metrics, we should do experiments to evaluate alternate
+network designs.
+
+Examples include:
+
+\begin{enumerate}[A)]
+
+\item If we give out Guard flags according to some other algorithm, how much safety can we get back?
+
+\item In Tor 0.2.1.x we started load balancing based on active bandwidth
+measurements,%
+\footnote{\url{https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/blob/HEAD:/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/README.BwAuthorities}}
+so we use the bandwidth weights in the network consensus rather than the
+weights in each relay descriptor.
+We know that change improved performance,%
+\footnote{\url{https://metrics.torproject.org/performance.html?graph=torperf&start=2009-08-01&end=2009-10-01\#torperf}}
+but at what cost to safety?
+
+\item What happens to the network diversity if we put a low cap%
+\footnote{\url{https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2286}}
+on the bandwidth weighting of any node that hasn't been assigned a
+measurement by the bandwidth authorities yet, to protect against relays
+that lie about their bandwidth?
+If there's no real effect, we should do it; but if there's a large effect,
+we should find a better plan.
+
+\item If we move forward with our plans to discard all relays under a
+given bandwidth capacity,%
+\footnote{\url{https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1854}}
+how will various choices of bandwidth threshold impact the network's
+safety?
+
+\item How about if we discard the X\% of paths with the highest expected
+latency, as suggested by Stephen Rollyson?%
+\footnote{\url{http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/ugResearch/uploads/7/ImprovingTor.pdf}}
+
+\item What if some Tor users choose their paths to optimize a different
+network property (like latency or jitter), as suggested by Micah Sherr
+\cite{SherrBL09}?
+The infrastructure you've built to measure diversity here should apply
+there too.
+
+\item If only a given fraction of exit relays support IPv6, how much does
+it reduce your anonymity to be going to an IPv6-only destination?
+
+\end{enumerate}
+
+We've put a lot of effort in the past year into understanding how to
+improve Tor's performance,%
+\footnote{\url{https://blog.torproject.org/blog/why-tor-is-slow}}
+but many of these design changes involve trading off safety for
+performance, and we still have very little understanding about how much
+safety Tor offers in the first place.
+Please help!
+
+\bibliography{measuring-safety-tor-network}
+
+\end{document}
+
diff --git a/2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/tortechrep.cls b/2011/measuring-safety-tor-network/tortechrep.cls
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