Traffic Analysis Attacks on Tor: A Survey

De-Anonymisation Attacks on Tor: A Survey

“…Also, note that this report has not been cited in any other publication previously. [2] 2009 Survey existing anonymous communication systems 6 Salo [9] 2010 Survey Tor attacks 10 Nepal et al [15] 2015 Survey de-anonymisation attacks on hidden services 3 Erdin et al [14] 2015 Survey de-anonymisation attacks on users 19 Yang et al [38] 2015 Classification of de-anonymisation techniques 6 AlSabah et al [10] 2016 Survey the research on performance and security of Tor 22 Evers et al [13] 2016 Survey Tor attacks 38 Saleh et al [11] 2018 Survey all aspects of Tor research 23 Aminuddin et al [39] 2018 Survey existing approaches for classifying Tor traffic N/A Kohls et al [40] 2018 An evaluation framework for confirmation attacks 10 Cambiaso et al [12] 2019 Survey Tor attacks 13 Basyoni et al [16] 2020 end passive attacks, congestion and timing attacks as endto-end active attacks, and fingerprinting attacks as single-end passive attacks. Our paper contains more de-anonymisation attacks on Tor when compared with [13], including 17 attacks since 2016, which makes our paper the most comprehensive paper on de-anonymisation attacks to date.…”

“…In a recent work published in 2020, Basyoni et al [16] present details on several Tor attacks from the perspective of the attack's adopted threat model. The authors of [16] categorise their attack corpus into three threat models; a global adversary, capturing entry flows and compromising Tor nodes. They compare Tor's original threat model with the above threat models.…”

“…anonymity networks [2], performance improvements for Tor [10], or broader Tor research [11]. Several other works have referenced only a small number of Tor attacks, even when their main focus is to present a survey on Tor attacks [9], [15], [12], [16]. Moreover, we have observed that most surveys do not provide much information on website fingerprinting attacks.…”

“…Erdin et al's [14] work does not address attacks on HS, while Nepal et al's [15] work only focuses on the de-anonymisation of HS. None of the papers except for Saleh et al [11] present information on other survey work, and only Basyoni et al [16] have referenced a significant number of attacks published since 2016. In this paper, we try to overcome all of these shortcomings and provide a comprehensive survey focused on de-anonymisation attacks.…”

“…Moreover, we discuss more than 15 de-anonymisation attacks published after 2016 (not reported in most of the previous works [10], [13], [14]), including attacks that use advanced techniques such as deep learning. We also note that some survey works [14], [15], [16] do not include details on website fingerprinting attacks and hidden service attacks, which are important types of deanonymisation attacks.…”