Traffic anonymization; Onion routing; TOR; TOR network configuration; Www; Latency comparison

The adverse aspect of TOR is an increase of overhead and decrease of the traffic speed. TOR operation is based on ?routing? the traffic through several nodes resulting in difficult and practically impossible direct calculation of the delay. This study was performed to quantify the delay associated with using TOR comparing ordinary traffic. The sample of www pages and files available via http was chosen and the round-trip time was measured approx. 10 times both with TOR and without TOR. The main result of the study is that the factor of round- trip time increase varies between 2 and more than 100. In case of configured TOR networks the ratio is lower but still high,1.7 and 34. This is quite rough result that is shown in details in the article. The results show that TOR is useful anonymization tool but the delay caused by its use is enormous. Providing of more exact estimations would require more measurements however.