Cryptographically Upgrading TOR Network to Enforce Anonymity by Enhancing Security and Improving Performances

The Onion Route Network (also called TOR) is by far the most efficient and widely used anonymity platform with millions of users daily and an expanding size and capacities. Since its public deployment in 2002, the Onion Routing network (also known as TOR) has maintained its leading position and dozens of propositions aiming to improve its performance and enhance the security (anonymity and privacy) have been made. Given the significance of this research area, this work seek to contribute into the improvement of TOR by investigating and testing revolutionary cryptographic and routing mechanism. This work is justified by the current TOR vulnerability and observed weaknesses, and set the challenging aim of covering these security flaws by proposing the relevant security and performances improvement such as the authenticated-encryption for onion construction, the lightened onion encapsulation approach and the secured circuit selection and cell routing mechanisms. The obtained results from implementing the proposed improvements and testing them into a TOR-like simulation platform permit to validate not only, the performances and security contributions brought by the improvement, but also the suitability of their potential implementation into the real TOR network.