[liberationtech] Tor and censorship: lessons learned - Roger Dingledine - Stanford - Oct 22 (TODAY)

[Steve Weis]

Sorry for the three-hour notice, but I just saw it myself. Roger
Dingledine from Tor will be speaking at this afternoon at the Stanford
Security Seminar:

Title: Tor and censorship: lessons learned
Date: Friday - Oct 22, 2010
Time: 4:30 pm
Venue: Stanford Campus, Gates 463A
Speaker: Roger Dingledine

Abstract:

Tor is a free-software anonymizing network that helps people around
the world use the Internet in safety. Tor's 1800 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 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 countries like China. 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. In the aftermath of the
Iranian elections in June 2009, and then the periodic blockings in
China, we've learned a lot about how circumvention tools work in
reality for activists in tough situations.

I'll give an overview of the  Tor architecture, and summarize the
variety of people who use it and what security it provides. Then we'll
focus on the use of tools like Tor in countries like Iran and China:
why anonymity is important for circumvention, why transparency in
design and operation is critical for trust, the role of popular media
in helping -- and harming -- the effectiveness of the tools, and
tradeoffs between usability and security. After describing Tor's
strategy for secure circumvention (what we *thought* would work), I'll
talk about how the arms race actually seems to be going in practice.

Bio:

Roger Dingledine is project leader for The Tor Project, a US
non-profit working on anonymity research and development for such
diverse organizations as the US Navy, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, and Voice of America. 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.