Laura Roberts will present her general exam on Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 2pm in CS 402. The members of her committee are Jennifer Rexford (adviser), Nick Feamster, and Arvind Narayanan. Everyone is invited to attend her talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Her abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: Tor is a very popular anonymity network that is known to be susceptible to end-to-end traffic correlation attacks that can be performed by network-level adversaries such as ASes and IXPs. Previous work on such attacks has focused on the TCP streams while the accompanying DNS traffic has been completely ignored. In our work we study the nature of DNS resolution in Tor and how DNS traffic can be used by network-level adversaries to deanonymize Tor traffic. For example, we are investigating how DNS traffic can be used to boost the success of website fingerprinting attacks. Our contributions include drawing attention to the role DNS can play in Tor deanonymization attacks and improving upon earlier Tor measurement techniques in order to produce results and estimates that are more practical and realistic. Reading List: - Computer Networks (5th edition) by Tanenbaum and Wetherall, Chs. 1, 5-8 - Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Anderson, Chs. 1-8, 21-24 - “Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router” by Dingledine et al. - “Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries” by Johnson et al. - “Location Diversity in Anonymity Networks” by Feamster and Dingledine - “Website Fingerprinting at Internet Scale” by Panchenko et al. - “A Critical Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks” by Juarez et al. - “Passive Attack Analysis for Connection-Based Anonymity Systems” by Serjantov and Sewell - “Defending Tor from Network Adversaries: A Case Study of Network Path Prediction” by Juen et al. - “AS-awareness in Tor Path Selection” by Edman and Syverson - “DNS measurements at a root server” by Brownlee et al. - “Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries” by Murdoch and Zieliński