A Lightweight and Easily Scalable Tor Network Simulation Method Based on K8s

Criminals use Tor’s powerful anonymity for illegal activities, which has attracted more and more researchers to study de-anonymization attacks on Tor. Researchers have difficulty conducting de-anonymization attack experiments in a real Tor network, they need a simulated environment. However, most of the existing Tor network simulation methods are difficult to meet the needs of de-anonymization attacks in terms of authenticity and flexibility, and some of them are not scalable, and other Tor network simulation methods that can meet the needs are costly. In this paper, we use K8s (Kubernetes) to build a lightweight and easily scalable Tor network simulation environment, using Docker as the basic unit for simulating the Tor relay. The results show that a thousand-scale Tor network can be simulated using four regular hosts. Meanwhile, we conducted two de-anonymization attack experiments to demonstrate that the simulated Tor network constructed in this paper has authenticity and flexibility.