HOT is a made-up short for the Swedish project name ‘Hoppet till Tor’, roughly translatable to ‘The hope/jump to Tor’. This project focuses on the first connection from a user’s computer into the Tor network. The goal of this project is to experimentally evaluate and customize one or more pluggable transports (PTs) for Tor to protect against website fingerprinting (WF) attacks.

HOT is funded by the Swedish Internet Fund and runs for one year, starting January 2016.

The project participants are Tobias Pulls and Stefan Lindskog at Karlstad University together with Philipp Winter and Nick Feamster at Princeton University.

The project is divided into three phases:

State-of-the-art and experiment design (January-April)

We are going to survey the state-of-the-art in WF attacks and PTs, to be able to answer the following question:

Which WF attacks should we focus on, and how should we evaluate them against relevant PTs?

As part of this, we will focus on what are the most realistic WF attacks and PTs for Tor and design relevant experiments.

Experimentation and evaluation (May-August)

Develop and perform the designed experiments, working iteratively. Our goal is for the experiments to be reproducible by other researchers. Towards this goal, all experiments will be documented on this homepage and all source code made publicly available.

Pluggable transports customization (September-December)

Finally, we will customize one or more PTs to optimize the performance in relation to the level of protection provided against WF attacks with the help of our experiments.