Protecting TOR exit nodes from abuse

TOR is a mechanism and a network that allows anonymous use of the resources on the Internet. This is very useful for countries with restricted human rights, but also in all the cases when someone has concerns about being watched or otherwise tracked. The main building blocks of the TOR network are TOR nodes that relay traffic in such way that each node knows for previous and next nodes. The special case are exit nodes that finally deliver traffic to it's intended destination, but that don't know from whom the traffic originates. All the TOR nodes are run by voluntaries throughout the Internet. It turns out that TOR network is heavily misused and thus it is dangerous to run TOR exit nodes as all the misuse of the network appears to be done from the exit nodes which could bring trouble to their owners. In this paper we analyse misuse of the TOR exit nodes and also propose mechanisms that could minimize, or even eliminate, misuse. More specifically, we analyse use of the Honeywall to protect TOR exit node.