Towards an Evaluation Framework for Tor Load Balancing
Work in Progress Paper at the 36th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2020), (2020)Abstract
Tor is a widely used anonymization network. Traffic is routed over different relay nodes to conceal the communication partner. The Tor Load Balancing Mechanism (TLBM) is responsible for assigning traffic to relays. However, up to this point, there are no agreed-upon quality and security metrics for evaluating the quality of the TLBM. In practice, multiple paper provide their own evaluation using custom metrics incomparable to related work. This paper aims to start bridging this gap by arguing for the necessity of a unified framework to evaluate TLBMs and by giving an overview of aspects that should be included in such a framework.