Sponsor 3
Project Title: EAGER: Collaborative: Faster and Stronger Onion Routing (FASOR)
Project Period: September 1, 2016 - August 31, 2018
Project !Goals/Activities
On the Internet, widespread surveillance and censorship by corporations and repressive regimes are the norm. Even connections that are encrypted can be surveilled and censored based on their metadata. To protect privacy, tools such as Tor are used to provide anonymity---but Tor’s layering produces performance problems, and Tor’s anonymity can be pierced in the future by quantum attacks against its cryptography.
The principal investigators propose to construct a new onion-routing protocol called FASOR (Faster and Stronger Onion Routing) that will enable low-latency connections that protect both content and metadata, even against retroactive attacks by future quantum computers.
The FASOR project starts from three existing efforts led by the PIs, and aims to combine the advantages of those efforts into a single unified system. First, Tor, mentioned above, is the most widely used system providing traffic-analysis protection for low-latency applications such as web browsing. Second, MinimaLT is a streamlined TLS-over-TCP redesign that provides very low latency, lower than TLS 1.3 and even lower than Google’s QUIC. Third, post-quantum cryptography consists of cryptographic systems that appear to resist attacks by quantum computers.
The design of FASOR will be clean-slate. It will consider optimization and security improvements across traditional protocol boundaries. This enables FASOR to reduce onion-routing costs, deploy high-security post-quantum cryptography, reduce duplication among different layers of the system, deploy a high-agility platform for introducing new functionality, and reduce the profile that attackers can target.