[tor-dev] Researching Tor: Quantifying anonymity against a global passive adversary

[Florian Rüchel]

Hi there,

I am currently writing my Master's thesis about Mix networks & Tor (was
on list previously). I am currently at a point, where I'd like to
practially quantify anonymity. That is, given a pcap, I want to anaylze
how successful an adversary can determine whether a specific client
talked to a specific service. Since I run all of this in a simulation
(using Shadow), I have access to ground truth and can determine the
traffic, network size, etc. arbitrarily.

The idea behind all of this is to integrate a Mix relay on each Tor node
and to watch how the adversarys success behaves. However, I have a hard
time finding material on such attacks, i.e. papers that closely examine
this scenario (and perhaps have conducted some simulation and/or
measurements themselves, beyond simple theory). The thing is that this
is only part of the research and I'd really prefer if I could build this
upon work of others instead of starting from scratch.

Do any of you know of such papers or corresponding research?

Regards,
Florian