ConsenSGX: Scaling Anonymous Communications Networks with Trusted Execution Environments

Anonymous communications networks enable individuals to maintain their privacy online. The most popular such network is Tor, with about two million daily users; however, Tor is reaching limits of its scalability. One of the main scalability bottlenecks of Tor and similar network designs originates from the requirement of distributing a global view of the servers in the network to all network clients. This requirement is in place to avoid epistemic attacks, in which adversaries who know which parts of the network certain clients do and do not know about can rule in or out those clients from being responsible for particular network traffic