ITor-SDN: Intelligent Tor Networks-Based SDN for Data Forwarding Management

Abstract

Tor (The Onion Routing) network was designed to enable users to browse the Internet anonymously. It is known for its anonymity and privacy security feature against many agents who desire to observe the area of users or chase users' browsing conventions. This anonymity stems from the encryption and decryption of Tor traffic. That is, the client's traffic should be subject to encryption and decryption before the sending and receiving process, which leads to delay and even interruption in data flow. Keys Exchange between network devices plays a fatal role in performing cryptographic procedures. To overcome delay or interruption problems, we utilized the Software-Defined Network (SDN), Machine Learning (ML), and Blockchain (BC) techniques, which support the Tor network to intelligently speed up exchanging the public key via the proactive processing of the Tor network security management information. Consequently, the combination network (ITor-SDN) keeps data flow continuity to a Tor client. We simulated and emulated the proposed network by using Mininet and Shadow simulations. The results show that the proposed network improves the overall performance by approximately 55% by executing the ITor-SDN network combination approach.