Understanding Tor Usage with Privacy-Preserving Measurement
This work addresses the problem of safely measuring Tor network usage for researchers and network analysts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing privacy-preserving techniques.
The paper tackled the challenge of measuring Tor usage without compromising user privacy by enhancing privacy-preserving tools, resulting in findings such as ~8 million daily Tor users (four times previous estimates) and that ~80% of accessed sites are in the Alexa top 1 million list.
The Tor anonymity network is difficult to measure because, if not done carefully, measurements could risk the privacy (and potentially the safety) of the network's users. Recent work has proposed the use of differential privacy and secure aggregation techniques to safely measure Tor, and preliminary proof-of-concept prototype tools have been developed in order to demonstrate the utility of these techniques. In this work, we significantly enhance two such tools--PrivCount and Private Set-Union Cardinality--in order to support the safe exploration of new types of Tor usage behavior that have never before been measured. Using the enhanced tools, we conduct a detailed measurement study of Tor covering three major aspects of Tor usage: how many users connect to Tor and from where do they connect, with which destinations do users most frequently communicate, and how many onion services exist and how are they used. Our findings include that Tor has ~8 million daily users (a factor of four more than previously believed) while Tor user IPs turn over almost twice in a 4 day period. We also find that ~40% of the sites accessed over Tor have a torproject.org domain name, ~10% of the sites have an amazon.com domain name, and ~80% of the sites have a domain name that is included in the Alexa top 1 million sites list. Finally, we find that ~90% of lookups for onion addresses are invalid, and more than 90% of attempted connections to onion services fail.