Tor hidden services make it possible to hide Internet services' location. Via so-called rendezvous circuits, Tor users can communicate with hidden services without learning each other's location. In this paper, we propose a performance-enhanced rendezvous circuit, which consists of five instead of six relays. We show that omitting the client's middle relay in a rendezvous circuit brings significant performance improvements and affects security only in case of very specific client behavior. In our security analysis we discuss a number of attacker strategies, including a novel honeypot scenario, and demonstrate that our approach maintains strong anonymity.
