Events Calendar

CS Colloquium

Speaker: Roger Dingledine, Project Leader - the Tor Project

Talk Title: Tor and the Censorship Arms Race: Lessons Learned

Abstract: Tor is a free-software anonymizing network that helps people around the world use the Internet in safety. Tor's 2200 volunteer relays carry traffic for several hundred thousand users including 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.

Tor was originally designed as a civil liberties tool for people in the West. But if governments or others can block connections *to* the Tor network, who cares that it provides great anonymity? A few years ago we started adapting Tor to be more robust in situations where authorities or operators actively attempt to impede its use. We streamlined its network communications to look more like ordinary SSL, and we introduced "bridge relays" that are harder for an attacker to find and block than Tor's public relays.

Through the Iranian elections in June 2009, the periodic blockings in China, the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, and whatever's coming next, we're learning a lot about how circumvention tools work in reality for activists in tough situations. This talk will assume some familiarity with Tor already, and jump quickly into the technical and social problems we're encountering, what technical approaches we've tried so far (and how they went), and what approaches I think we're going to need to try next.

Biography: Roger Dingledine is project leader for The Tor Project, a US non-profit working on anonymity research and development for such diverse organizations as Voice of America, the U.S. Navy, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In addition to all the hats he wears for Tor, Roger organizes academic conferences on anonymity, speaks at a wide variety of industry and hacker conferences, and also does tutorials on anonymity for national and foreign law enforcement.


Host: Terry Benzel and John Wroclawski - USC/ISI

Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 210

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal