SmartMeasurer: A Secure and Automated Bandwidth Measurement for Tor with Smart Contract

Zejia Tang, Tianyao Pan, Yang Han, Tongzhou Shen, Lei Xu and Dawei Xu ()
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Zejia Tang: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Tianyao Pan: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Yang Han: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Tongzhou Shen: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Lei Xu: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Dawei Xu: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Mathematics, 2023, vol. 11, issue 19, 1-21

Abstract: Tor is now using a centralized measurement system called Sbws to measure the bandwidth of relays to guide clients in selecting relays to balance traffic. Sbws has been proven to be vulnerable to multiple attacks because of the centralized structure and exposed measurements. We present SmartMeasurer, a secure and decentralized system for bandwidth measurement. Combining smart contract, Oracle Chainlink and ECC technology, we achieve decentralization while hiding the measurement circuits among the general circuits by exploiting the dual identity of randomly dynamic measurers and guards. We analyze the security of our system and demonstrate that it defends against three types of attacks. Our experiments on both private and public Tor networks show that our system is decentralized while keeping the error and the average of our measurements converges to a small interval of 0.30 Mbps. Compared to other existing methods, our system reduces trust assumptions and the costs of using smart contract, and enhances the practical feasibility of the solution.

Keywords: Tor; load balancing; smart contract; blockchain; decentralization; security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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