Adding QUIC support to the Tor network

Master thesis (2019)

Authors

W.F. Sabée Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

J.A. Pouwelse Data-Intensive Systems - EEMCS (graduation committee member)
S. Roos Data-Intensive Systems - EEMCS (mentor)
N. Yorke-Smith Algorithmics - EEMCS (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2019 Wendo Sabée
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Published Date

30-08-2019

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Privacy in the Internet is under attack by governments and companies indiscriminately spying on everyone. The anonymity network Tor is a solution to restore some privacy, however, Tor is slow in both bandwidth and latency. It uses a TCP-based connection to multiplex different circuits between nodes and this causes different independent circuits to interfere with each other. To solve this, we propose a transport layer implementation using the UDP-based protocol QUIC, as it allows independent streams over a single connection. We built a Tor prototype that uses this protocol and evaluated its performance using a custom network simulator, as existing simulators were shown to be incompatible. We show that the QUIC-based implementation increased performance in several of the use case scenarios, mainly outperforming on the ‘time to first byte’ metric.