Ricerc@Sapienza

Tor is a free software that prevents people from learning your location or browsing habits by letting you communicate anonymously on the Internet. It can be used to anonymize on the web both browsing users and users that offers services. Thank to its anonymity and the consequent freedom, it has become the main channel to avoid censorship on the web or to spoke about sensitive topics. The downside is that also illegal actions have find their space here, so we have seen a proliferate of drugs and stolen stuff markets and also forum of controversial topics.
The anonymity provided by the Tor may be less effective using software not originally intended to preserve user privacy.
The goal of this project is to exploit data gathered from forums and social networks residents on Tor in order to reconstruct a detailed user access pattern to the net and show how they can be used to jeopardize users privacy.
Indeed, every time users write both on forums and social networks also under Tor, their actions are recorded as timestamp and we can use these sources as a kind of public and persistent ledger.
We want to study how the access pattern reconstruction can lead to a user location leak, and apply this attack to all users of the targeted forums, in order to trace the demography of the forums.
Lastly, we want to try to correlate single user profile over different source both in tor network and in clear web.