user_image

Rob G. Jansen, PhD

Computer Scientist, Researcher, and Principal Investigator
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA

Publication Details

  1. Citation

    Rob JansenNicholas Hopper, and Yongdae Kim:
    Recruiting New Tor Relays with BRAIDS. Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2010.

    Author Links

    Venue Links

    Abstract

    Tor, a distributed Internet anonymizing system, relies on volunteers who run dedicated relays. Other than altruism, these volunteers have no incentive to run relays, causing a large disparity between the number of users and available relays. We introduce BRAIDS, a set of practical mechanisms that encourages users to run Tor relays, allowing them to earn credits redeemable for improved performance of both interactive and non-interactive Tor traffic. These performance incentives will allow Tor to support increasing resource demands with almost no loss in anonymity: BRAIDS is robust to well-known attacks. Using a simulation of 20,300 Tor nodes, we show that BRAIDS allows relays to achieve 75% lower latency than non-relays for interactive traffic, and 90% higher bandwidth utilization for non-interactive traffic.

    Bibtex

    @inproceedings{braids-ccs2010,
      title = {Recruiting New {Tor} Relays with {BRAIDS}},
      author = {Jansen, Rob and Hopper, Nicholas and Kim, Yongdae},
      booktitle = {Conference on Computer and Communications Security},
      year = {2010},
      doi = {10.1145/1866307.1866344},
    }