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Challenges in Protecting Tor Hidden Services from Botnet Abuse

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8437))

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Abstract

In August 2013, the Tor network experienced a sudden, drastic reduction in performance due to the Mevade/Sefnit botnet. This botnet ran its command and control server as a Tor hidden service, so that all infected nodes contacted the command and control through Tor. In this paper, we consider several protocol changes to protect Tor against future incidents of this nature, describing the research challenges that must be solved in order to evaluate and deploy each of these methods. In particular, we consider four technical approaches: resource-based throttling, guard node throttling, reuse of failed partial circuits, and hidden service circuit isolation.

Work done while on sabbatical with the Tor Project.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Naturally, finding the right number to use for this default rate is also an interesting research challenge: a very low rate-limit could prevent bots from flooding the network but might also disrupt legitimate hidden service clients.

  2. 2.

    Detecting this condition in a privacy-preserving manner represents another technical challenge requiring further research.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mike Perry, Ian Goldberg, Yoshi Kohno, and Roger Dingledine for helpful comments about the problems discussed in this paper. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grants 1111734 and 1314637 and DARPA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Nicholas Hopper

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  1. Nicholas Hopper
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Correspondence to Nicholas Hopper .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Nicolas Christin

  2. University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

    Reihaneh Safavi-Naini

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© 2014 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Hopper, N. (2014). Challenges in Protecting Tor Hidden Services from Botnet Abuse. In: Christin, N., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8437. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-45471-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-45472-5

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