Characterizing the Nature and Dynamics of Tor Exit Blocking.

TitleCharacterizing the Nature and Dynamics of Tor Exit Blocking.
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsSingh, R., Nithyanand R., Afroz S., Tschantz M. Carl, Gill P., & Paxson V.
Published inProceedings of USENIX Security 2017
Abstract

The functioning of mobile apps involves a large number of protocols and entities, with the Domain Name System (DNS) acting as a predominant one. Despite being one of the oldest Internet systems, DNS still operates with semi-obscure interactions among its stakeholders: domain owners, network operators, operating systems, and app developers. The goal of this work is to holistically understand the dynamics of DNS in mobile traffic along with the role of each of its stakeholders. We use two complementary (anonymized) datasets: traffic logs provided by a European mobile network operator (MNO) with 19M customers, and traffic logs from 5,000 users of Lumen, a traffic monitoring app for Android. We complement such passive traffic analysis with active measurements at four European MNOs. Our study reveals that 10k domains (out of 198M) account for 87% of total network flows. The time to live (TTL) values for such domains are mostly short (< 1min), despite domain-to-IPs mapping tends to change on a longer time-scale. Further, depending on the operators recursive resolver architecture, end-user devices receive even smaller TTL values leading to suboptimal effectiveness of the on-device DNS cache. Despite a number of on-device and innetwork optimizations available to minimize DNS overhead, which we find corresponding to 10% of page load time (PLT) on average, we have not found wide evidence of their adoption in the wild.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Facebook Threat Exchange for providing IP blacklists and Tor exit operators: Moritz Bartl (Torservers.net), Kenan Sulayman (apx), Riccardo Mori (jahjah), and the operator of the exit relay TorLand1 for sharing the abuse complaints they received. We are grateful to David Fifield, Mobin Javed and the anonymous reviewers for helping us improve this work. We acknowledge funding support from the Open Technology Fund and NSF grants CNS-1237265, CNS1518918, CNS-1406041, CNS-1350720, CNS-1518845, CNS-1422566. The opinions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of a sponsor or the United States Government. 

URLhttps://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-singh.pdf
ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security