Improving the Tor Hidden Service Protocol Aiming at Better Performances

Abstract

Offering services anonymously on the Internet using so-called location-hidden services requires complex protocols with many different nodes involved. These properties result in performance problems, e.g. a simple website request taking tens of seconds. This work describes a setup to measure the performance of hidden services using the worldwide Tor network. It analyzes the results and proposes changes to the protocol to improve the performance without losing anonymity