Paul Syverson
Tor's onion routing to secure and private communications for diverse users

Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

Tor is a system widely used throughout the world for free and open access to the Internet while protecting anonymity and other properties of communications. We will present a brief introductory overview from Tor's origins as an onion routing project of the Naval Research Laboratory to the present: what it does, what security it provides, who built it, and how it works. We will also describe some of our latest work, providing the first analysis of the security typical Tor users can expect against reasonably realistic adversaries in the Tor network or in the underlying Internet. Our results show that Tor users are far more susceptible to compromise than indicated by prior work.

Paul Syverson---inventor of onion routing and other technologies, designer of Tor, multiply published author, chair of many security and privacy conferences---has received various patents and awards, several advanced degrees, and an origami magic rabbit folded for him by Gus Simmons. For over two decades as Mathematician at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, he has investigated authentication, epistemic logic, information flow in probabilistic systems, incentives in protocols and systems, anonymous communication, and other aspects of computer security and privacy. Paul is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer Security, has served as director of international computer security organizations, and has been a visiting scholar and guest lecturer at universities and institutes in the U.S., England, and Italy. You can humor him by feigning interest in any of this or something you find at http://www.syverson.org.
IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040