Recruiting new tor relays with BRAIDS

Tor, a distributed Internet anonymizing system, relies on volunteers who run dedicated relays. Other than altruism, these volunteers have no incentive to run relays, causing a large disparity between the number of users and available relays. We introduce BRAIDS, a set of practical mechanisms that encourages users to run Tor relays, allowing them to earn credits redeemable for improved performance of both interactive and non-interactive Tor traffic. These performance incentives will allow Tor to support increasing resource demands with almost no loss in anonymity: BRAIDS is robust to well-known attacks. Using a simulation of 20,300 Tor nodes, we show that BRAIDS allows relays to achieve 75% lower latency than non-relays for interactive traffic, and 90% higher bandwidth utilization for non-interactive traffic. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems; C.2.0 [Computer-Communication Networks]: General--Security and Protection General ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Rob Jansen, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim
• Keywords: CCS 2010, Computer-Communication Networks, Non-interactive Tor Traffic, Relays, Security Privacy