Onion Routing Efficiency for Web Anonymization in Various Configurations

Abstract

Web traffic anonymization is hiding the originator of the web request. Although is required in some circumstances, such feature is not included in the WWW service. Anonymization can be reached using various commercial and public domain tools. The obvious adverse aspect of anonymization is the significant slowing down of the anonymized traffic compared to the normal traffic. This study focuses on measurement of the parameters of such slowing down (in terms of transmission speed and latency). This study is based on previous studies concluding that TOR (The Onion Routing) is the best available free web anonymization tool. Nevertheless the TOR’s cost of operation in terms of response time increase is still too high so the main goal of this paper is to find ways how to make them lower. The extensive set of WWW pages and files was formed and the latency and response time during their download was measured repeatedly both with anonymization in various configurations and without it. The result showed that there are some ways how to improve the TOR efficiency but despite them the cost still remains too high for ordinary use.