Location-Aware Onion Routing

The Tor network provides low-latency anonymous communication to over two million users daily. To be practical for widespread use, Tor uses onion routing, which does not protect a user against an adversary that can observe a user’s traffic at certain vulnerable positions along the traffic’s route through the Inter-net. A natural defense would be to choose Tor relays to minimize the chance that the resulting route can be observed by a network adversary. This idea has been explored to some extent [2, 1]. However, sig-nificant security and performance challenges remain. This talk will describe the work of the author and others on designing location-aware path selection al-gorithms in Tor and outline the challenges that re-main to be solved