Practical Metrics for Evaluating Anonymous Networks.

As an application of privacy-enhancing technology, anonymous networks play an important role in protecting the privacy of Internet users. Different user groups have different perspectives on the need for privacy protection, but now there is a lack of a clear evaluation of each anonymous network. Some works evaluated anonymous networks, but only focused on a part of the anonymous networks metrics rather than a comprehensive evaluation that can be of great help in designing and improving anonymous networks and can also be a reference for users' choices. Therefore, this paper proposes a set of anonymous network evaluation metrics from the perspective of developers and users, including anonymity, anti-traceability, anti-blockade, anti-eavesdropping, robustness and usability, which can complete the comprehensive evaluation of anonymous networks. For each metric, we consider different factors and give a quantitative or qualitative method to evaluate it with a score or a level. Then we apply our metrics and methods to the most popular anonymous network Tor for evaluation. Experiments show that the metrics are effective and practical.