Tor Incentives Design Brainstorms 1. Goals: what do we want to achieve with an incentive scheme? 1.1. Encourage users to provide good relay service (throughput, latency). 1.2. Encourage users to allow traffic to exit the Tor network from their node. 2. Approaches to learning who should get priority. 2.1. "Hard" or quantitative reputation tracking. In this design, we track the number of bytes and throughput in and out of nodes we interact with. When a node asks to send or receive bytes, we provide service proportional to our current record of the node's value. One approach is to let each circuit be either a normal circuit or a premium circuit, and nodes can "spend" their value by sending and receiving bytes on premium circuits: see section 4.1 for details of this design. Another approach (section 4.2) would treat all traffic from the node with the same priority class, and so nodes that provide resources will get and provide better service on average. This approach could be complemented with an anonymous e-cash implementation to let people spend reputations gained from one context in another context. 2.2. "Soft" or qualitative reputation tracking. Rather than accounting for every byte (if I owe you a byte, I don't owe it anymore once you've spent it), instead I keep a general opinion about each server: my opinion increases when they do good work for me, and it decays with time, but it does not decrease as they send traffic. Therefore we reward servers who provide value to the system without nickle and diming them at each step. We also let them benefit from relaying traffic for others without having to "reserve" some of the payment for their own use. See section 4.3 for a possible design. 2.3. Centralized opinions from the reputation servers. The above approaches are complex and we don't have all the answers for them yet. A simpler approach is just to let some central set of trusted servers (say, the Tor directory servers) measure whether people are contributing to the network, and provide a signal about which servers should be rewarded. They can even do the measurements via Tor so servers can't easily perform only when they're being tested. See section 4.4. 2.4. Reputation servers that aggregate opinions. The option above has the directory servers doing all of the measurements. This doesn't scale. We can set it up so we have "deputy testers" -- trusted other nodes that do performance testing and report their results. If we want to be really adventurous, we could even accept claims from every Tor user and build a complex weighting / reputation system to decide which claims are "probably" right. 3. Related issues we need to keep in mind. 3.1. Relay and exit configuration needs to be easy and usable. Implicit in all of the above designs is the need to make it easy to run a Tor server out of the box. We need to make it stable on all common platforms (including XP), it needs to detect its available bandwidth and not overreach that, and it needs to help the operator through opening up ports on his firewall. Then we need a slick GUI that lets people click a button or two rather than editing text files. Once we've done all this, we'll hit our first big question: is most of the barrier to growth caused by the unusability of the current software? If so, are the rest of these incentive schemes superfluous? 3.2. The network effect: how many nodes will you interact with? One of the concerns with pairwise reputation systems is that as the network gets thousands of servers, the chance that you're going to interact with a given server decreases. So if 90% of interactions don't have any prior information, the "local" incentive schemes above are going to degrade. This doesn't mean they're pointless -- it just means we need to be aware that this is a limitation, and plan in the background for what step to take next. (It seems that e-cash solutions would scale better, though they have issues of their own.) 3.3. Guard nodes As of Tor 0.1.1.11, Tor users pick from a small set of semi-permanent "guard nodes" for their first hop of each circuit. This seems like it would have a big impact on pairwise reputation systems since you will only be cashing in on your reputation to a few people, and it is unlikely that a given pair of nodes will use each other as guard nodes. What does this imply? For one, it means that we don't care at all about the opinions of most of the servers out there -- we should focus on keeping our guard nodes happy with us. One conclusion from that is that our design needs to judge performance not just through direct interaction (beginning of the circuit) but also through indirect interaction (middle of the circuit). That way you can never be sure when your guards are measuring you. 3.4. Restricted topology: benefits and roadmap. As the Tor network continues to grow, we will need to make design changes to the network topology so that each node does not need to maintain connections to an unbounded number of other nodes. For anonymity's sake, we may partition the network such that all the nodes have the same belief about the divisions and each node is in only one partition. (The alternative is that every user fetches his own random subset of the overall node list -- this is bad because of intersection attacks.) Therefore the "network horizon" for each user will stay bounded, which helps against the above issues in 3.2 and 3.3. It could be that the core of long-lived servers will all get to know each other, and so the critical point that decides whether you get good service is whether the core likes you. Or perhaps it will turn out to work some other way. A special case here is the social network, where the network isn't partitioned randomly but instead based on some external properties. Social network topologies can provide incentives in other ways, because people may be more inclined to help out their friends, and more willing to relay traffic if most of the traffic they are relaying comes from their friends. It also opens the door for out-of-band incentive schemes because of the out-of-band links in the graph. 3.5. Profit-maximizing vs. Altruism. There are some interesting game theory questions here. First, in a volunteer culture, success is measured in public utility or in public esteem. If we add a reward mechanism, there's a risk that reward-maximizing behavior will surpass utility- or esteem-maximizing behavior. Specifically, if most of our servers right now are relaying traffic for the good of the community, we may actually *lose* those volunteers if we turn the act of relaying traffic into a selfish act. I am not too worried about this issue for now, since we're aiming for an incentive scheme so effective that it produces tens of thousands of new servers. 3.6. What part of the node's performance do you measure? We keep referring to having a node measure how well the other nodes receive bytes. But don't leeching clients receive bytes just as well as servers? Further, many transactions in Tor involve fetching lots of bytes and not sending very many. So it seems that we want to turn things around: we need to measure how quickly a node is _sending_ us bytes, and then only send it bytes in proportion to that. However, a sneaky user could simply connect to a node and send some traffic through it, and voila, he has performed for the network. This is no good. The first fix is that we only count if you're receiving bytes "backwards" in the circuit. Now the sneaky user needs to construct a circuit such that his node appears later in the circuit, and then send some bytes back quickly. Maybe that complexity is sufficient to deter most lazy users. Or maybe it's an argument in favor of a more penny-counting reputation approach. 3.7. What is the appropriate resource balance for servers vs. clients? If we build a good incentive system, we'll still need to tune it to provide the right bandwidth allocation -- if we reserve too much bandwidth for fast servers, then we're wasting some potential, but if we reserve too little, then fewer people will opt to become servers. In fact, finding an optimum balance is especially hard because it's a moving target: the better our incentive mechanism (and the lower the barrier to setup), the more servers there will be. How do we find the right balance? One answer is that it doesn't have to be perfect: we can err on the side of providing extra resources to servers. Then we will achieve our desired goal -- when people complain about speed, we can tell them to run a server, and they will in fact get better performance. 3.8. Anonymity attack: fast connections probably come from good servers. If only fast servers can consistently get good performance in the network, they will stand out. "Oh, that connection probably came from one of the top ten servers in the network." Intersection attacks over time can improve the certainty of the attack. I'm not too worried about this. First, in periods of low activity, many different people might be getting good performance. This dirties the intersection attack. Second, with many of these schemes, we will still be uncertain whether the fast node originated the traffic, or was the entry node for some other lucky user -- and we already accept this level of attack in other cases such as the Murdoch-Danezis attack [http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#torta05]. 3.9. How do we allocate bandwidth over the course of a second? This may be a simple matter of engineering, but it still needs to be addressed. Our current token bucket design refills each bucket once a second. If we have N tokens in our bucket, and we don't know ahead of time how many connections are going to want to send out how many bytes, how do we balance providing quick service to the traffic that is already here compared to providing service to potential high-importance future traffic? If we have only two classes of service, here is a simple design: At each point, when we are 1/t through the second, the total number of non-priority bytes we are willing to send out is N/t. Thus if N priority bytes are waiting at the beginning of the second, we drain our whole bucket then, and otherwise we provide some delayed service to the non-priority bytes. Does this design expand to cover the case of three priority classes? Ideally we'd give each remote server its own priority number. Or hopefully there's an easy design in the literature to point to -- this is clearly not my field. Is our current flow control mechanism (each circuit and each stream start out with a certain window, and once they've exhausted it they need to receive an ack before they can send more) going to have problems with this new design now that we'll be queueing more bytes for less preferred nodes? If it turns out we do, the first fix is to have the windows start out at zero rather than start out full -- it will slow down the startup phase but protect us better. While we have outgoing cells queued for a given server, we have the option of reordering them based on the priority of the previous hop. Is this going to turn out to be useful? If we're the exit node (that is, there is no previous hop) what priority do those cells get? Should we do this prioritizing just for sending out bytes (as I've described here) or would it help to do it also for receiving bytes? See next section. 3.10. Different-priority cells arriving on the same TCP connection. In some of the proposed designs, servers want to give specific circuits priority rather than having all circuits from them get the same class of service. Since Tor uses TCP's flow control for rate limiting, this constraints our design choices -- it is easy to give different TCP connections different priorities, but it is hard to give different cells on the same connection priority, because you have to read them to know what priority they're supposed to get. There are several possible solutions though. First is that we rely on the sender to reorder them so the highest priority cells (circuits) are more often first. Second is that if we open two TCP connections -- one for the high-priority cells, and one for the low-priority cells. (But this prevents us from changing the priority of a circuit because we would need to migrate it from one connection to the other.) A third approach is to remember which connections have recently sent us high-priority cells, and preferentially read from those connections. Hopefully we can get away with not solving this section at all. 4. Sample designs. 4.1. Two classes of service for circuits. 4.2. Treat all the traffic from the node with the same service; hard reputation system. 4.3. Treat all the traffic from the node with the same service; soft reputation system. Rather than a guaranteed system with accounting (as 4.1 and 4.2), we instead try for a best-effort system. All bytes are in the same class of service. You keep track of other Tors by key, and give them service proportional to the service they have given you. That is, in the past when you have tried to push bytes through them, you track the number of bytes and the average bandwidth, and use that to weight the priority of their connections if they try to push bytes through you. Now you're going to get minimum service if you don't ever push bytes for other people, and you get increasingly improved service the more active you are. We should have memories fade over time (we'll have to tune that, which could be quite hard). Pro: Sybil attacks are pointless because new identities get lowest priority. Pro: Smoothly handles periods of both low and high network load. Rather than keeping track of the ratio/difference between what he's done for you and what you've done for him, simply keep track of what he's done for you, and give him priority based on that. Based on 3.3 above, it seems we should reward all the nodes in our path, not just the first one -- otherwise the node can provide good service only to its guards. On the other hand, there might be a second-order effect where you want nodes to like you so that *when* your guards choose you for a circuit, they'll be able to get good performance. This tradeoff needs more simulation/analysis. This approach focuses on incenting people to relay traffic, but it doesn't do much for incenting them to allow exits. It may help in one way through: if there are few exits, then they will attract a lot of use, so lots of people will like them, so when they try to use the network they will find their first hop to be particularly pleasant. After that they're like the rest of the world though. Pro: this is a pretty easy design to add; and it can be phased in incrementally simply by having new nodes behave differently. 4.4. Centralized opinions from the reputation servers. Have a set of official measurers who spot-check servers from the directory to see if they really do offer roughly the bandwidth they advertise. Include these observations in the directory. (For simplicity, the directory servers could be the measurers.) Then Tor servers give priority to other servers. We'd like to weight the priority by advertised bandwidth to encourage people to donate more, but it seems hard to distinguish between a slow server and a busy server. The spot-checking can be done anonymously to prevent selectively performing only for the measurers, because hey, we have an anonymity network. We could also reward exit nodes by giving them better priority, but like above this only will affect their first hop. Another problem is that it's darn hard to spot-check whether a server allows exits to all the pieces of the Internet that it claims to. If necessary, perhaps this can be solved by a distributed reporting mechanism, where clients that can reach a site from one exit but not another anonymously submit that site to the measurers, who verify. A last problem is that since directory servers will be doing their tests directly (easy to detect) or indirectly (through other Tor servers), then we know that we can get away with poor performance for people that aren't listed in the directory. Maybe we can turn this around and call it a feature though -- another reason to get listed in the directory. 5. Recommendations and next steps.