MirageFlow: A New Bandwidth Inflation Attack on Tor

—The Tor network is the most prominent system for providing anonymous communication to web users, with a daily user base of 2 million users. However, since its inception, it has been constantly targeted by various traffic fingerprinting and correlation attacks aiming at deanonymizing its users. A critical requirement for these attacks is to attract as much user traffic to adversarial relays as possible, which is typically accomplished by means of bandwidth inflation attacks. This paper proposes a new inflation attack vector in Tor, referred to as MirageFlow, which enables inflation of measured bandwidth. The underlying attack technique exploits resource sharing among Tor relay nodes and employs a cluster of attacker-controlled relays with coordinated resource allocation within the cluster to deceive bandwidth measurers into believing that each relay node in the cluster possesses ample resources. We propose two attack variants, C-MirageFlow and D-MirageFlow, and test both versions in a private Tor test network. Our evaluation demonstrates that an attacker can inflate the measured bandwidth by a factor close to n using C-MirageFlow and nearly half n ∗ N using D-MirageFlow, where n is the size of the cluster hosted on one server and N is the number of servers. Furthermore, our theoretical analysis reveals that gaining control over half of the Tor network’s traffic can be achieved by employing just 10 dedicated servers with a cluster size of 109 relays running the MirageFlow attack, each with a bandwidth of 100MB/s. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that Tor not only allows resource sharing but, according to recent reports, even promotes it.