Usability of Anonymous Web Browsing: An Examination of Tor Interfaces and Deployability
July 19, 2007 by Richard Conlanhttp://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2007/proceedings/p41_clark.pdf
This paper compares four deployment methods of Tor for Firefox. There are numerous identifiers used while surfing the web, including those that are self-volunteered (pseudonyms, e-mail addresses, etc.), server-assigned identifier, and protocol-based (i.e. IP address). Tor itself actually only addresses the IP address. Tor is often combined with Vidalia, Privoxy, Torbutton, and/or FoxyProxy.
In most security applications, your security is dependent only on your own ability to use the software. With Tor, your anonymity is dependent on both your own ability to use the software the ability of other users because anonymity increases in proportion to the number of users. Therefore it is important to make Tor as accessible as possible to ensure a sufficiently large user pool for the onion routing to provide strong anonymity.
Dangers w/ Tor:
- false sense of completion
- DNS leaks
- Java applets, Flash, and client-side scripting can be exploited to bypass anonymity technologies
The researchers used a cognitive walkthrough premised on a pragmatic user. The walkthrough focused on the difficulty of installing, configuring, and verifying the use of Tor and friends, analyzing each step against typical usability guidelines. The overall conclusion is that it is still rather cumbersome to install, configure, and use Tor. Suggestions from the researchers include improving documentation language by making it task-focused and possibly drawing language from observing users explaining the steps to one another. They also noted that there are no good solutions for blocking Java, Flash, and client-side scripting exploits. This last point might make it so that Tor offers a false sense of security on many websites that make use of such technologies.