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

[Mike Fischer]

for those of us not near Stanford, could we get a brief account?


On Oct 22, 2010, at 4:20 PM, Steve Weis wrote:

> 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.
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