Resumen de Contribuciones a la privacidad y anonimato en internet: sistema de nombres de dominio y onion routing de segunda generación
Sergio Castillo Pérez
Everyday all our activity in Internet leaves traces of ourselves and of our way of life through the storing of a big amount of personal data, becoming what we call our digital identity. Nowadays, the tracking of the user activities correlated with such digital identities has become one of the principal interest of not only private companies, but also governments. The nature of such interest can obey to different motivations: business, politics, surveillance or censorship among others. Moreover, the exponential growth of the available data and the capabilities to process it has lead to a worst situation. In response to these circumstances, the demand of privacy-preserving and anonymous technologies has been increased on the part of concerned users.
In this line, in the sea of data which we call Internet, some of the underlying protocols that are underpinning its operation are detrimental to the safeguarding of the aforementioned privacy properties. The Domain Name System (DNS) is clearly an example of one of such protocols, specially if we consider that almost every activity on the Internet starts with a DNS query. In fact, when DNS was designed inthe early eighties it was not intended to guarantee the privacy of people’s queries. In that sense, its underlying design is becoming insufficient to face the changes and innovations of today’s Internet.
In contrast, during the recent years, the Tor network has become one of the most popular overlay networks for anonymising TCP traffic. Tor is a low-latency anonymity system that can be installed as an end-user application on a wide range of operating systems, allowing to redirect the traffic through a series of anonymising virtual tunnels. In such a way, users can use network services over Internet without compromising their privacy. Also, it is employed as en extremely effective censorship circumvention tool, allowing to its users to connect against blocked resources.
This dissertation is precisely focused on contributing to these two aforementioned topics —the DNS protocol and the Tor network— by studying the related privacy and anonymity problems and reinforcing current solutions. More precisely, our research efforts are centered on (1) The abuse of the DNS protocol performed by botnets and how we can detect such malicious purpose, (2) The lack of privacy of the DNS protocol and how we can improve it, and (3) How we can enhance the performance of the Tor network while security is preserved.
