Performance analysis of a Tor-like onion routing implementation

Any sense of privacy on The Internet is an illusion. Even Tor, which could be considered the most privacy preserving networking framework in existence, has its flaws [3]. Furthermore, privacy-enhancing technology is difficult to use for normal users and it slows down The Internet. For instance, should one first setup a VPN and then Tor or Tor and then VPN? Getting it wrong might actually negatively impact a user’s privacy1. With yearly sales of smartphones and smart watches approaching one billion, threats to user privacy are becoming a global phenomenon. People can be traced to a location within (in the worst case) 20 meters in realtime23 and recognized [1]. With these billions of people facing threats ranging from targeted advertisement to burglary or even harassment, the need for scalable and light-weight privacy-enhancing technology becomes apparent. However, no optimized implementation of a scalable architecture exists in this emerging research field. We provide a key step forward by identyfing bottlenecks in Tribler.