Automatic control of configuration of web anonymization

• Published in: International journal of new computer architectures and their applications Vol. 3; no. 2; pp. 1 - 10
• Main Author: Sochor, Tomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications 01.04.2013
• Subjects: Active control; Automatic control; Deceleration; Internet; Methods; Privacy; Proposals; Response time; Safety and security measures; Traffic engineering; Traffic flow
• ISSN: 2220-9085; 2220-9085

Anonymization of the Internet traffic usually hides details about the request originator from the target server. Such a disguise might be required in some situations, especially in the case of web browsing. Although the web traffic anonymization is not a part of the http specification, it could be achieved using a certain extra tool. Significant deceleration of anonymized traffic compared to normal traffic is inevitable but it can be controlled in some cases as this article suggests. The results presented here focus on measuring the parameters of such deceleration in terms of response time, transmission speed and latency and proposing the way how to control it. This study focuses on TOR primarily because recent studies have concluded that other tools (like I2P and JAP) provide worse service. Sets of 14 file locations and 30 web pages have been formed and the latency, response time and transmission speed during the page or file download were measured repeatedly both with TOR active in various configurations and without TOR. The main result presented here comprises several ways how to improve the TOR anonymization efficiency and the proposal for its automatic control. In spite of the fact that efficiency still remains too low compared to normal web traffic for ordinary use, its automatic control could make TOR a useful tool in special cases.