Anonymous Connections Based on Onion Routing: A Review and a Visualization Tool

Anonymity of persons and services on the Internet has been an area of growing interest in academia and industry. In this paper, we review work on visualization tools for teaching information security and assurance. We then focus on concepts related to anonymous connections, Onion Routing (OR) protocol, and Tor network. We also present a visualization tool, VISACOR, to demonstrate these concepts. The tool can be used as part of an active and blended instructional strategy for courses related to information security and assurance. We broke down the whole system into several modules that collectively allow the learners to better master the core components, communications, and various modes of operations to achieve anonymity. As a design principle, we aimed to make the tool interactive, comprehensive, and easy to use through animation and user-friendly graphical interface.