Cynthia Wagner and Gerard Wagener, Ph.D. students of the SECAN-Lab at the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication, were awarded the Best Paper Award at the NSS 2010 conference.

The title of the prize-winning paper is ‘Breaking Tor anonymity with Game Theory and Data Mining’ and the authors are Cynthia Wagner, Gérard  Wagener, Radu State, Alexandre Dulaunoy and Thomas Engel.
Their research paper presents a new attack using  Game-Theory and Data Mining for breaking the anonymity of Tor networks. The International conference on Network and System Security (NSS) has an acceptance rate of 24% and focuses on issues related to Network and System Security, such as authentication, availability, integrity, privacy, confidentiality and more ( http://www.anss.org.au ).

Attacking anonymous communication networks is very tempting and many attacks have already been observed. Wagner and Wagener consider the case of Tor, a widely-used anonymous overlay network and propose a new attack originated from only one rogue exit node.

"Our attack is composed of two main elements. The first, to distinguish between users, we tag users while they are browsing. Secondly, we try to classify the tagged user data by using a semi-supervised classification algorithm. The classification allows us to reconstruct their browsing sessions. Captured traffic flows are clustered into sessions, such that one session is most probably associated to a specific user. We have implemented a prototype and evaluated its performance on the real Tor network.", said Wagner and Wagener.

Furthermore, the article describes several advanced attacks and the respective countermeasure by referring to a game-theoretical framework.