Fuzzy control of configuration of web anonymization using TOR
Tomáš Sochor · 2013
Anonymization of any Internet traffic usually hides the details of the request originator from its target computer. Such a hiding might be required in some situations, especially in the case of web browsing. Anonymization of web traffic is not a part of the http specification, however, it can be achieved using a certain extra tool, either commercial or public one. Significant deceleration of anonymized traffic compared to normal traffic is inevitable but it can be controlled as this article suggests. The study focuses on measuring the parameters of such deceleration in terms of response time, transmission speed and latency and proposing the way how to control it. This study focuses on TOR solely as recent studies have concluded that other tools (like I2P and JAP) provide worse service. Sets of 30 web pages and 14 file locations have been formed and the latency, response time and transmission speed during the page or file download have been measured repeatedly both with TOR active in various configurations and without TOR. The main result presented here comprises several ways how to improve the TOR anonymization efficiency and the proposal for its automatic control. In spite of the fact that efficiency still remains too low compared to normal web traffic for ordinary use, its automatic control could make TOR a useful tool in some special cases.