Usability Inspection of Anonymity Networks

Today, to be monitored while surfing the web seems to be a natural act and thus tools and applications to achieve online anonymity are more important than ever. The usability of such a tool plays not only a prominent role for each single user; in the area of anonymization networks it usually holds that the protection for every single user is higher, the more users participate. Hence, usability is of great importance, since bad usability decreases the number of potential users. In this paper we examine the usability of four software implementations for anonymous communication techniques especially with regards to the installation procedure. The usability is evaluated with the help of cognitive walk-throughs. We also inspect the quality of service of these implementations by means of a performance test.