Performance Comparison of Low-Latency Anonymisation Services from a User Perspective,” in Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Abstract. Neither of the two anonymisation services Tor and AN.ON clearly outperforms the other one. AN.ON’s user-perceived QoS is gen-erally more consistent over time than Tor’s. While AN.ON’s network latencies are low compared to Tor, it suffers from limitations in band-width. Interestingly, Tor’s performance seems to depend on the time of day: it increases in the European morning hours. Utilising AN.ON’s re-porting of concurrently logged-in users, we show a correlation between load and performance. The reported number of users should be adjusted, though, so that it serves as a better indicator for security and perfor-mance. Finally, the results indicate the existence of an overall tolerance level for acceptable latencies of approximately 4 seconds, which should be kept in mind when designing low-latency anonymisation services.