Protecting the Tor network from Sybil attacks Talk proposal

The Tor network is periodically subject to Sybil attacks. Most of these attacks were not carefully executed and Tor directory authority operators were quick to detect and block the malignant relays. However, the Tor network lacks sophisticated tools to detect and protect against Sybil attacks. As a result, more advanced attacks could remain undetected. While there is a large body of work dedicated to defending against Sybil attacks in peer-to-peer networks, most proposals do not apply to the Tor network as there is no underlying trust relationship between Tor relays. We propose tools to detect Sybils and use them to analyse archived relay descriptors. These tools not only help us gain insights about past attacks and anomalies but they also help us to detect new ones.