A cyber security researcher team from America and Israel come up with a new Tor client which is designed to make spying more difficult for the world's most capable intelligence agencies.
According to the research paper, people have used Tor, a popular anonymity system for users who wish to access the Internet anonymously or circumvent censorship, to prevent their activity from being tracked as Internet anonymity becoming difficult to establish.
However, Tor is not as safe as it was supposed to be, from the powerful intelligence agencies.
As a result the researchers have developed Astoria, which particularly focuses on defeating autonomous systems that has set up to intrude into Tor’s anonymity.
“In our experiments, we find that 58% of all circuits created by Tor are vulnerable to attacks by timing correlation and colluding sibling ASes. We find that in some regions (notably, China) there exist a number of cases where it is not possible for Tor to construct a circuit that is safe from these correlation attacks,” said in the research paper.
It added, “To mitigate the threat of such attacks, we build Astoria, an AS-aware Tor client. Astoria uses leverages recent developments in network measurement to perform pathprediction and intelligent relay selection. It not only reduces the number of vulnerable circuits to 5.8%, but also considers how circuits should be created when there are no safe possibilities. It performs load balancing across the Tor network, so as to not overload low capacity relays. Moreover, it provides reasonable performance even in its most secure configuration.”
The Astoria is aimed to do a list of things:
• Deal with asymmetric attackers.
• Deal with the possibility of colluding attackers.
• Consider the worst case possibility.
• Minimize performance impact.