Poster: Large-Scale Tor Experimentation

Abstract—Tor is the most popular low-latency anonymous communication system for the Internet, helping people to protect their privacy online and circumvent Internet censorship. Its distributed design and low-latency based anonymity has attracted the attention of network and security researchers alike who work on evaluating the performance and security of the network. Evaluating changes to the design of the protocol or studying attacks against it in the live network is undesirable as it can invade the privacy of users and even put them in harm’s way. Traditional Tor research has been limited to testing a few hundred nodes with the Modelnet network emulator, which may not accurately represent the real-world Tor network. We present SNEAC (Scalable Network Emulator for Anonymous Communication), a large-scale network emulator that allows us to emulate a network with thousands of nodes. Our hope is that with such large-scale experimentation, we can more closely emulate the live Tor network with half a million users. I