Optimizing Onionbalance: Improving Scalability and Security for Tor Onion Services
摘要
This paper addresses the critical issue of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on Tor Onion Services by focusing on load balancing mechanism. We analyze the current available mechanisms and discuss potential options for enhancing scalability and security of Onion Services. We leverage and modify the existing tool Onionbalance to be fully backward compatible and increase the acceptance of our modifications. Our approach includes optimizing the creation and distribution of service descriptors introducing a more efficient load-balancing mechanism. We also analyze and discuss the security implications of these enhancements and provide a practical implementation with comprehensive tests in a test bed and the real Tor network. Our results demonstrate that the proposed improvements significantly increase the resilience of Onion Services against DoS attacks, ensuring better service availability and security for users.