My name is Nima Azizzadeh and I'm a second year of mastering Cyber
Security major at University of Tehran, Iran. I am extremely interested
in pursuing independent research. An extensive research experience will
greatly help me consolidate my future career choice.
Recently I'm interested in tor project vulnerabilities and I looked at some papers about it. This paper "The Effect of DNS
on Tor’s Anonymity, NDSS, February 2017" attracted a great deal of my
attention. A lot of research has gone into improving the Tor network,
but its use of DNS has received little attention. In this research
project, they set out to learn how DNS can harm the anonymity of Tor
users, and how adversaries can leverage the DNS protocol to deanonymize
users. They studied (i) how exposed the DNS protocol is compared to web
traffic, (ii) how Tor exit relays are configured to use DNS, (iii) how
existing website fingerprinting attacks can be enhanced with DNS, and
(iv) how effective these enhanced website fingerprinting attacks are at
Internet-scale.
Also, I found another project that I
think can defend against these attacks to some degree. The project is
T-DNS (Connection-Oriented DNS to Improve Privacy and Security - DNS
over TCP and TLS). It combines TCP to smoothly support large payloads
and mitigate spoofing and amplification for DoS. T-DNS uses
transport-layer security (TLS) to provide privacy from users to their
DNS resolvers and optionally to authoritative servers.
I
want to integrate T-DNS server proxy and client proxy with Tor project
source code to add some security feature to Tor project. I also
implement T-DNS server proxy and client proxy I just need to add this
feature in Tor source code. Something like creating a built-in standalone T-DNS client proxy and server proxy in Tor relays, and encourage people to use them with Tor Exits (and other DNS clients and servers).