Practical anonymous communication on the mobile internet using Tor

This paper proposes and evaluates several architectural designs for enabling anonymous browsing on the mobile Internet. These architectural designs make use of the Tor network in a mobile setting for the provisioning of anonymity to mobile devices. We compare several architectural designs with respect to their anonymity and performance properties. In particular, we are interested in finding a trade-off between anonymity and performance. We also evaluate the architectural designs against other criteria such as practicality, usability, availability, and trust. We show that the most preferable option - given a powerful mobile device and some optimizations in the Tor protocol - is the option where the Tor client is run directly on the mobile device.