Abstract

Tor’s success is threatened by differential treatment of Tor traffic by a growing number of websites: Tor users cannot post comments over Slashdot, edit Wikipedia, occasionally run into a captcha when searching over Google, and are outright refused pages by Yelp. The problem is amplified when this practice is adopted by “bottleneck” websites (think Cloudflare, Akamai, Disqus) whose components are used by many other websites, or when Tor exit nodes are listed on blacklists used by a large number of websites. Currently, there is no consensus on how websites should treat anonymous users and each website operator works out its own policy. There are two aspects of this problem: (1) enumeration of websites and services that handle Tor traffic different from normal connections, and (2) propose technical and social solutions that minimise differential treatment of Tor users while keeping website operators happy. In this talk, I will discuss what we are doing to address part 1 of this problem.