A controlled, reproducible, and extensible experiment for evaluating the impact of Tor latency

Abstract

The Tor anonymity network is an essential protection for those living in oppressive regimes, who may be persecuted for their speech or other activities on the Internet. However, its usability is severely affected by high latency. Furthermore, because of the difficulty associated with conducting research evaluations on the Tor network, there has been insufficient research aimed at this problem. To address this, we develop a CloudLab profile that instantiates a private Tor testing network for easy, reproducible experimental evaluations on Tor. We demonstrate how to use this CloudLab profile to measure the page load time of selected web pages over a Tor network under different network conditions representative of typical Tor usage.