As a Senior Information Controls Fellow, Yixin Sun focused her fellowship on increasing the resiliency of anonymity networks, specifically Tor.
Working out of Princeton’s Security and Privacy Lab, Yixin implemented a new Tor client that increases the resilience of the relay selection algorithm (the mechanism that decides the manner in which your traffic is directed in order to create anonymity). This lowers the probability of a Tor client being affected by a hijack attack on its guard relay. Yixin also built a live BGP monitoring system that gets live BGP updates to check for suspicious routing changes/updates. After trialing the system, it lowered the probability of being affected by attacks, while not impacting the performance. She co-authored a paper, “Counter-RAPTOR: Safeguarding Tor Against Active Routing Attacks.” The project was also featured on the Princeton website.
