News

Seminar

Anonymous communication for the U.S. Department of Defense...and you.

Roger Dingledine
Moria Research Labs

Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Sage 3303 - 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.

Abstract:

What do the United States Department of Defense and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have in common? They are both funding the development of Tor (tor.eff.org), a free-software onion routing network that helps people around the world use the Internet in safety.

The public Tor network has over 250 servers on six continents, and averages over 100Mbit/s of traffic. Our users include ordinary citizens who want protection from identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look at a competitor's website in private, and soldiers and aid workers in the Middle East who need to contact their home servers without fear of physical harm.

I'll give an overview of the Tor architecture, and talk about why you'd want to use it, what security it provides, and how user applications interface to it. I'll demo a working Tor network, and invite the audience to connect to it and use it.

Bio:

Roger Dingledine is a security and privacy researcher. While at MIT he developed Free Haven, one of the early peer-to-peer systems that emphasized resource management while retaining anonymity for its users. Currently he consults for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the US Navy to design and develop systems for anonymity and traffic analysis resistance. Recent work includes anonymous publishing and communication systems, traffic analysis resistance, censorship resistance, attack resistance for decentralized networks, and reputation.

Hosted by: Bulent Yener (x6907)

Last updated: October 6, 2005