[LINK] Tor (aka The Onion Router)

[Roger Clarke]

I was an invited speaker at the Executive Session of the PET Workshop 
in early June, held near Dubrovnik:  http://petworkshop.org/2005/

My rather prosaic and only partially-complete paper is:
     Business Cases for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
     http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/PETsBusCase.html
(The slides are a bit better than the paper)

One important conversation I had there was with Roger Dingledine 
mailto:arma at mit.edu, who runs Tor.

Tor is an anonymising communication service. No node knows both the 
original source and the ultimate destination of the message.  Each 
message bounces around enough nodes to ensure that the source and 
destination are anonymous to one another.  (Predecessors include 
Anonymizer and ZKS Freedom.  For a catalogue of services and tools of 
this kind, see http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html#surf).

It appears that no-one in Australia is running a node.  Can linkers 
pass the word around that contributors are sought?  Australia is 
normally an early and important player in services like this one!

________________________________________________________________________

Articles about Tor:

Linux Weekly News	http://lwn.net/Articles/138242/
Tuaw.com		http://www.tuaw.com/2005/06/22/privacy-watch-tor/
"Packets, including routing information, are encrypted between each 
node and each node has access to only very limited information about 
the next hop. Furthermore, packets pass through a random number of 
nodes (the more the merrier) and not all packets from a single 
session need follow the same route. This makes it very, very 
difficult (it's tempting to say impossible, but that's probably not 
quite true) to trace the ultimate origin or destination of any packet 
on the network unless the contents of the packet divulge revealing 
information"

________________________________________________________________________

Main site at http://tor.eff.org/
Documentation at http://tor.eff.org/documentation.html
TOR Network Statistics at http://www.noreply.org/tor-running-routers/
TOR Network Status at http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:8000/cgi-bin/exit.pl
FAQ at http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ

-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW