Hiding Amongst the Clouds: A Proposal for Cloud-based Onion Routing

Abstract

Internet censorship and surveillance have made anonymity tools increasingly critical for free and open Internet access. Tor, and its associated ecosystem of vol-unteer traffic relays, provides one of the most secure and widely-available means for achieving Internet anonymity today. Unfortunately, Tor has limitations, including poor performance, inadequate capacity, and a susceptibility to wholesale blocking. Rather than utilizing a large number of volunteers (as Tor does), we propose mov-ing onion-routing services to the “cloud ” to leverage the large capacities, robust connectivity, and economies of scale inherent to commercial datacenters. This paper de-scribes Cloud-based Onion Routing (COR), which builds onion-routed tunnels over multiple anonymity service providers and through multiple cloud hosting providers, dividing trust while forcing censors to incur large collat-eral damage. We discuss the new security policies and mechanisms needed for such a provider-based ecosys-tem, and present some preliminary benchmarks. At to-day’s prices, a user could gain fast, anonymous network access through COR for only pennies per day. 1