Performance of hidden services in Tor

Abstract

In this thesis we will provide an overview of the Tor hidden service protocol. We will demonstrate the steps of setting up Tor hidden services and a private Tor network for testing purposes. The performance of the hidden services will be measured with regards to throughput, initial access time, connection latency, and reliability. The results show that hidden services on the public network can be used for web servers and instant messaging. On a private network, voice over IP and video streaming can be used as well. The hidden services are currently limited by the public network performance of Tor, but we obtained significantly higher performance on a private Tor network.