Sponsor V
Project Title: Enhancing Anonymity Network Resilience against Pervasive Internet Attacks
Project Period: October 1, 2015 - September 30, 2019
Project !Goals/Activities
Overview
Joint project with Georgetown and NRL focusing on research about resilience to attacks that reduce anonymity or that deny service.
The grant also includes a "transition to practice" component, which means we should not only help with the research side, but also build and deploy the more promising solutions.
Deliverables
- Produce research papers
- Release software (e.g. Tor) that includes fixes based on the research papers
- Work with Micah Sherr and Rob Jansen
Denial of Service
We've added an entire DoS subsystem in tor in 0.3.3.x series. Main ticket is #24902 (moved) which will be backported very soon to 0.2.9, 0.3.1 and 0.3.2 stable version.
[[TicketQuery(keywords=tor-dos,milestone=~0.3.3.x-final,order=priority,desc=1,format=table,col=summary|status|owner)]]
Project Tracking
Guard
Tentative Roadmap
We currently believe that guard discovery attacks are the most serious threat to anonymity and availability of the Tor network. We are collecting tickets for the these vectors under the Trac keyword guard-discovery.
This roadmap is a living document. We do not have an exhaustive list of all attacks and fixes for guard discovery, and other attacks that are also in scope for this sponsor may appear at any time. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Short Term (0.3.2/0.3.3)
Our short term plan is to go after low hanging fruit. Several of the guard discovery attack vectors are very easy to mitigate, but very hard to solve entirely. We must not let perfect be the enemy of good during this phase.
To start, a few relatively simple changes can be completed on the 0.3.2/0.3.3 timescale that should mitigate vectors relating to our statistics reporting and gathering:
[[TicketQuery(keywords=guard-discovery-stats,milestone=~0.3.2.x-final,order=priority,desc=1,format=table,col=summary|owner|milestone)]]
[[TicketQuery(keywords=guard-discovery-stats,milestone=~0.3.3.x-final,order=priority,desc=1,format=table,col=summary|owner|milestone)]]
Separate from the above, Proposal 247 is our proposal for changing Tor's path selection for onion services to deal with middle-node trawling-based attacks. Unfortunately, Proposal 247 requires quite a bit of performance tuning before we can do a final implementation. The final implementation will also require extensive modifications to Tor's path selection code, at least for onion services.
The good news is that we can provide significantly improved security before we complete a final implementation by providing torrc options and an add-on a Tor Controller that implements our intended path selection algorithm. This same add-on Tor controller will also be used for performance evaluation. The target release for this initial work is Tor 0.3.3, which freezes mid-January 2018. The set of development work for this is:
[[TicketQuery(keywords=guard-discovery-prop247-controller,order=priority,desc=1,format=table,col=summary|owner|milestone)]]
Long Term (post-0.3.3)
After 0.3.3, we plan to simulate the performance properties of Prop247 using the add-on controller. Separately, we will also simulate the time-until-compromise estimates of various parameter choices. We will use the results of these experiments to finalize parameter choices for the native Tor implementation of Proposal 247.
Proposal 247 by itself is insufficient to deal with all forms of guard discovery. In particular, circuit lifetime attacks like #22728 (moved) suggest that we need some way of re-establishing circuits to an IP/RP over a new path. the conflux technique may be one way to do this. Note that for #22728 (moved) we do not need the flow control and load balancing pieces of conflux. We only need the ability to migrate an RP/IP from one path to another.
Here are all of the post-0.3.3 guard discovery tickets:
[[TicketQuery(keywords=guard-discovery,milestone=~unspecified,order=priority,desc=1,format=table,col=summary|owner|milestone)]]
Research Topics
As we address passive versions of #22728 (moved), we should also determine if the flow control mechanisms of conflux (or some other multipath routing) can provide any benefit against congestion attacks and other forms of denial of service attack against guard nodes.
XXX: I'm sure there are other things we need researched also.