2026-10-11T13:39:35Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:25602 2026-06-23T10:10:06Z ddc:004 open_access

Don’t Get Caught, Keep Your Onions in a Vault Ikram, Humza Habib, Rumaisa Ali, Muaz Uzmi, Zartash Afzal Tor anonymity Hidden Services Trusted Execution Environments When web applications wish to operate anonymously, they routinely host themselves as "Hidden Services" in the Tor network. However, these services are frequently threatened by deanonymization attacks, whereby their IP address and location may be inferred by the authorities. We present VaulTor, a novel architecture for the Tor network that ensures an extra layer of security for the Hidden Services against deanonymization attacks. In this new architecture, a volunteer (vault) is incentivized to host the web application content on behalf of the Hidden Service. The vault runs the hosted application in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and becomes the point of contact for interested clients. This setup can substantially reduce the uptime requirement of the original Hidden Service provider, thereby significantly decreasing the chance of deanonymization attacks against them. Using a vault node in place of the hidden service node does not cause any noticeable performance degradation when accessing the hosted content. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Humza Ikram and Rumaisa Habib and Muaz Ali and Zartash Afzal Uzmi 2026 Is Part Of OASIcs, Volume 139, 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.17 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-256027 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.17 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode