ТРУДЫ УЧЕБНЫХ ЗАВЕДЕНИЙ СВЯЗИ 2018. Т. 4. № 3 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LOW LATENCY ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS I. Murtala1, O.A. Tiamiyu2* 1De-Kharms Telecommunications, Ilorin, Kwara, Nigeria 2University of Ilorin, Ilorin, PMB 1515, Nigeria *E-mail: [email protected] Article info Article in English For citation: Murtala I., Tiamiyu O.A. Comparative Analysis of Low Latency Anonymous Communication Systems // Proceedings of Telecommunication Universities. 2018. Vol. 4. Iss. 3. PP. 85–97. Abstract: With the rapid development and general acceptance of the Internet globally, concealing one’s identity (remaining unknown) for protection and security reasons while communicating over Internet is of great concern. Thus, anonymity has turned into an essential and legitimate aim in numerous applications, including anonymous web surfing, location based services, and E-voting. This study compares existing implementation of various low la- tency anonymous communication systems, more precisely, onion routing techniques, with respect to user require- ments such as performance, reliability and usability to determine their level of efficiency. Keywords: Internet security, anonymity techniques, secure browsing, user experience. 1. INTRODUCTION making no consideration to the status of the receiver Communication over the Internet has dispersed in- or the message itself. Receiver anonymity is when the to the very core fabric of the human relationship. Be- identity of the receiver is unknown to both the sender cause of this high diffusion of the Internet adoption, of the message and any intermediary or third party several threats such as identity theft are becoming that may be in between the sender and the receiver. rampant. This has led to the rise in the usage of ano- When servers that exist in a communication path are nymity techniques to secure user identity and message not identifiable as nodes inside the channel, we have a content over the Internet. form of node anonymity. This type of anonymity is necessitated where associating with a particular Anonymity in straightforward terms implies con- anonymous communication is dangerous. In carrier cealing one’s identity or in another word remaining anonymity, nodes between a sender and a receiver are unknown while communicating [1–3]. For different unidentifiable as carriers for conveying message be- reasons, a client may need to remain unknown while tween them. communicating over the Internet. Some of the reasons may be institutions worrying that employees might Several anonymity tools exist that are based on use their systems with a specific end goal to unlawful- both high latency anonymity technique and low laten- ly get to copyrighted material. Browsing the web also cy anonymity technique. Different anonymous tech- incurs additional security risk as threats such as iden- niques that exist have different performance and are tity theft may involve spoofing and cloning a client’s IP adopted for different reasons. High Latency Anonymi- address and using it to launch an attack [4]. Govern- ty (HLA) techniques (e.g. Single Mix, and Mix Networks ment surveillance also infringes the right of individu- and Mix Cascades) provide stricter encryption but at als when access to the contents that the government the cost of network performance, thus, low latency feels may have political, economic or security impact is anonymity (LLA) technique (e.g. Single Hop Proxy, DC- blocked. In all the aforementioned reasons, a user may Nets and Onion Routing) is preferred. Three major choose to utilize an anonymity tool to conceal his iden- onion routing tools that are widely used for anonymity tity and thus self-protect from the harms of the Inter- are Tor, JonDo and I2P [6]. net and remain unknown to concerned agencies. A common belief held by most users of anonymous The need to protect user’s identity propelled the systems is that anonymity technique though protects designing of anonymous communication systems [5]. their identity on the Internet, limits efficiency and per- formance of services being sought via them. This There are several forms of anonymity depending on believes can be traced to the ideology that there exists the intent of the anonymity. Sender anonymity implies server that serves as an encryption tool or in most that the identity of the originator of a message who cases, which fabricate a false address for the host to communicates over a network stays hidden while DOI:10.31854/1813-324X-2018-4-3-85-97 85 tuzs.sut.ru ТРУДЫ УЧЕБНЫХ ЗАВЕДЕНИЙ СВЯЗИ 2018. Т. 4. № 3 use, and as a result, the overhead processes will add to performance. Notwithstanding, when a client simply the delay incurred by transmission. surfs the Internet, the client expects a proper perfor- mance. The users will most likely not use a service if 2. LITERATURE REVIEW these expectations are not met. Several studies have Unlike the conventional approach based on only attempted to determine the maximum tolerable time cryptography to securing a communication channel, for loading a website. Different numbers are estimated anonymous communication utilizes both cryptography for the value of the tolerable time but no consensus and necessitates resistance to traffic analysis. Using was made for the exact value of maximum tolerable conventional approach such as encryption will ensure time. However, recent research by Kopsel and Wen- confidentiality, digital certificates, furthermore, Mes- dolsky et al concluded that about four seconds is the sage Authentication Codes (MACs) will ensure authen- maximum tolerable delay for most users [12]. ticity and hash functions will ensure the integrity of In their work, Stephanie Winkler and Sherali message to determine if there has been an Zeadally (2015) [13], identified, explained and ana- unauthorized modification [7]. However, conventional lyzed publicly available online anonymity technologies security approach does not protect a session from be- in terms of their usability and how online anonymity ing analyzed by both an authorized and unauthorized technology can be improved to increase public adop- person. tion. They did not compare the existing tools. Onion Routing Low Latency Anonymity techniques Jiejun Kong, Xiaoyan Hong [14] addressed problems are more efficient in terms of network performance for route anonymity by deploying ANODR that ensures [8]. Different tools that employ the technique would be that adversaries cannot discover the real identities of analyzed for comparison in this study. However, sev- local transmitters. The work did not also compare the eral onion routing anonymity tools exist and several existing tools. Rather, it was based on “broadcast with concerns have been made towards the efficiency of trapdoor information”, a novel network security con- those tools mostly in terms of the delay incurred and cept which includes features of two existing network the overall throughput of the system. This creates a and security mechanisms, namely “broadcast” and problem of choice that will best suit user’s purpose of “trapdoor information”. anonymity for communication over the Internet. For these reasons and more, this study investigates the 2.1. Onion Routing Tools performance of existing anonymity tools used in TOR – an open source project that provides anonymity anonymous communication systems to deduce their service for TCP applications. It is a popular edge strengths and weaknesses, and compare them to de- network for communicating anonymously over the termine their level of efficiency. The end results of the Internet [11]. TOR is 2 G Onion Router, and it is the study will help users and researchers understand per- most prevalent onion routing technique that is still formance difference of onion routing based anonymity accessible till date. tools, and will assist them to efficiently choose an ano- TOR (further as Tor) consists of four basic compo- nymity tool that best suits their purpose. nents namely Client (otherwise referred to as Alice) Because of its far reaching use with around 300,000 that runs a local program called onion proxy to anon- clients every day [6], existing performance measure- ymize the client information into Tor; Server (other- ments in anonymous systems principally focus on Tor. wise referred to as Bob) which is a TCP application Snader et al [5] focus on upgrading throughput in Tor (e.g. web services) that runs on the server and com- and proposed algorithm to accomplish faster execu- municates anonymously with Client over the Tor net- tion or higher anonymity. However, importance of work; Onion switches – special proxies that transfer latency is as essential as throughput in anonymization the application information amongst Client and Server networks [9, 10]. (here, Transport Layer Security, TLS) associations are utilized for the overlay link encryption between two Important issues in choosing a proper anonymity onion routers. The application information is stuffed tool are considered by researchers occasionally. The into equal-sized cells of 512 bytes); and lastly, Direc- ideal system should be dependable, cheap and easy to tory servers that hold onion router data such as pub- use. The design of a general model in order to depict lic keys, legitimate data and directory caches from the motivations in anonymous networks was expand- which onion routers download registry data. ed. Furthermore, the reason for relaying traffic be- tween nodes using Tor with the aim of improving the Joining TOR network using onion routing makes it overall network performance