The path less travelled: Overcoming Tor's bottlenecks with traffic splitting

Tor is the most popular low-latency anonymity network for enhancing ordinary users’ online privacy and resisting censorship. While it has grown in popularity, Tor has a variety of performance problems that result in poor quality of service, a strong disincentive to use the system, and weaker anonymity properties for all users. We observe that one reason why Tor is slow is due to low-bandwidth volunteer-operated routers. When clients use a low-bandwidth router, their throughput is limited by the capacity of the slowest node.