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.
@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},
}