This paper examines an existential threat to Tor— the increasing frequency at which websites apply discriminatory behavior to users who arrive via the anonymity network.
Our main contribution is the introduction of Tor exit bridges. Exit bridges, constructed as short-lived virtual machines on cloud service providers, serve as alternative egress points for Tor and are designed to bypass server-side censorship. Due to the proliferation of managed cloud-based desktop services (e.g., Amazon Workspaces), there is already a surprisingly large fraction of web requests that originate in the cloud. Trivially disrupting exit bridges by blocking requests from the cloud would thus lead to significant collateral damage.
Our experiments demonstrate that exit bridges effectively circumvent server-side blocking of Tor with low overhead. Ad- ditionally, we perform a cost-analysis of exit bridges and show that even a large-scale deployment can be done at low cost.
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Bypassing Tor Exit Blocking with Exit Bridge Onion Services
Tor exit blocking, in which websites disallow clients arriving from Tor, is a growing and potentially existential threat to the anonymity network. This paper introduces HebTor, a new and robust architecture for exit bridges—short-lived proxies that serve as alternative egress points for Tor. A key insight of HebTor is that exit bridges can operate as Tor onion services, allowing any device that can create outbound TCP connections to serve as an exit bridge, regardless of the presence of NATs and/or firewalls. HebTor employs a micro-payment system that compensates exit bridge operators for their services, and a privacy-preserving reputation scheme that prevents freeloading. We show that HebTor effectively thwarts server-side blocking of Tor, and we describe the security, privacy, and legal implications of our design.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10299563
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3 to 16
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3372297.3417245
