skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Tracey, Justin"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. null (Ed.)
    Tor is a popular low-latency anonymous communication system that focuses on usability and performance: a faster network will attract more users, which in turn will improve the anonymity of everyone using the system. The standard practice for previous research attempting to enhance Tor performance is to draw conclusions from the observed results of a single simulation for standard Tor and for each research variant. But because the simulations are run in sampled Tor networks, it is possible that sampling error alone could cause the observed effects. Therefore, we call into question the practical meaning of any conclusions that are drawn without considering the statistical significance of the reported results. In this paper, we build foundations upon which we improve the Tor experimental method. First, we present a new Tor network modeling methodology that produces more representative Tor networks as well as new and improved experimentation tools that run Tor simulations faster and at a larger scale than was previously possible. We showcase these contributions by running simulations with 6,489 relays and 792k simultaneously active users, the largest known Tor network simulations and the first at a network scale of 100%. Second, we present new statistical methodologies through which we: (i) show that running multiple simulations in independently sampled networks is necessary in order to produce informative results; and (ii) show how to use the results from multiple simulations to conduct sound statistical inference. We present a case study using 420 simulations to demonstrate how to apply our methodologies to a concrete set of Tor experiments and how to analyze the results. 
    more » « less