Distributed anonymous communication networks like Tor depend on volunteers to donate their resources. However, the efforts of Tor volunteers have not grown as fast as the demands on the Tor network. We explore techniques to incentivize Tor users to relay Tor traffic too; if users contribute resources to the Tor overlay, they should receive faster service in return. In our design, the central To...

Target of Rapamycin (TOR) signaling is an important regulator in multiple organisms including yeast, plants, and animals. However, the TOR signaling in plants is much less understood as compared to that in yeast and animals. TOR kinase can be efficiently suppressed by rapamycin in the presence of functional FK506 Binding Protein 12 KD (FKBP12) in yeast and animals. In most examined higher plant...

The Target of Rapamycin (TOR) proteins function in signaling pathways that promote protein synthesis and cell growth. In yeast, TOR signaling is regulated by nutrient availability, whereas in metazoan cells TOR activities may be controlled by both nutrients and growth factors. The recent identification of novel TOR-interacting proteins has provided crucial insights into TOR regulation and funct...

Although Tor has state-of-the art anticensorship measures, users in heavily censored environments will not be able to connect to Tor if they cannot configure their connections. We perform the first usability evaluation of Tor Launcher, the graphical user interface (GUI) that Tor Browser uses to configure connections to Tor. Our study shows that 79% (363 of 458) of user attempts to connect to To...

Due to the amount of anonymity afforded to users of the Tor infrastructure, Tor has become a useful tool for malicious users. With Tor, the users are able to compromise the non-repudiation principle of computer security. Also, the potentially hackers may launch attacks such as DDoS or identity theft behind Tor. For this reason, there are needed new systems and models to detect the intrusion in ...

Previous work in yeast has suggested that modification of tRNAs, in particular uridine bases in the anticodon wobble position (U34), is linked to TOR (target of rapamycin) signaling. Hence, U34 modification mutants were found to be hypersensitive to TOR inhibition by rapamycin. To study whether this involves inappropriate TOR signaling, we examined interaction between mutations in TOR pathway g...

This paper analyzes the web browsing behaviour of Tor users. By collecting HTTP requests we show which websites are of interest to Tor users and we determined an upper bound on how vulnerable Tor users are to sophisticated de-anonymization attacks: up to 78 % of the Tor users do not use Tor as suggested by the Tor community, namely to browse the web with TorButton. They could thus fall victim t...

Tor is one of the most widely-used privacy enhancing technologies for achieving online anonymity and resisting censorship. Simultaneously, Tor is also an evolving research network on which investigators perform experiments to improve the network’s resilience to attacks and enhance its performance. Existing methods for studying Tor have included analytical modeling, simulations, small-scale netw...