DNS Traffic of a Tor Exit Node - An Analysis

Sonntag, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-05345-1_3

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In his analysis of DNS traffic from a Tor exit node, Sonntag [66] finds that popularity according to Alexa does not imply regular traffic over Tor, listing several domains with a good Alexa rank but that are barely seen in the DNS traffic. These conclusions confirm that different sources show a different view of popularity, and that the Alexa list may not be the most appropriate for all types of research (e.g.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tranco: A Research-Oriented Top Sites Ranking Hardened Against Manipulation

Pochat¹,

Goethem²,

Tajalizadehkhoob³

et al. 2019

Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

357

225

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In order to evaluate the prevalence of security and privacy practices on a representative sample of the Web, researchers rely on website popularity rankings such as the Alexa list. While the validity and representativeness of these rankings are rarely questioned, our findings show the contrary: we show for four main rankings how their inherent properties (similarity, stability, representativeness, responsiveness and benignness) affect their composition and therefore potentially skew the conclusions made in studies. Moreover, we find that it is trivial for an adversary to manipulate the composition of these lists. We are the first to empirically validate that the ranks of domains in each of the lists are easily altered, in the case of Alexa through as little as a single HTTP request. This allows adversaries to manipulate rankings on a large scale and insert malicious domains into whitelists or bend the outcome of research studies to their will. To overcome the limitations of such rankings, we propose improvements to reduce the fluctuations in list composition and guarantee better defenses against manipulation. To allow the research community to work with reliable and reproducible rankings, we provide TRANCO, an improved ranking that we offer through an online service available at https://tranco-list.eu.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%