[freehaven-dev] Anonymity tutorial at MIT, Wed Jan 15, 7-10pm

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

I'm doing a tutorial on anonymity designs, as part of the MIT I/S series
of talks this January. It will be along the lines of my Blackhat and
Defcon talks from August, but going into more detail. We'll likely have
some form of refreshments.

The room is plenty big, so feel free to show up, and bring plenty
of questions. I'll adapt the material based on audience clue and
interests. Please forward this to other relevant/interested lists.

  "Why is anonymity so hard?"
  Roger Dingledine
  Wednesday, Jan 15, 7-10pm
  MIT Room 54-100 (http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?locate=bldg_54)
  Open to the public

With reasonable anonymity designs that are decades old, it seems
clear that we should have a reliable, secure, and ubiquitous anonymity
network by now. But apart from the purely technical challenges, there
are social barriers as well. The complexity of distributing trust,
problems funding the infrastructure or getting volunteers to run it,
and challenge of making users comfortable all conspire to make deploying
a strong anonymity system very difficult.

I'll start with a crash course on anonymity designs, and compare ease of
deployment based on the above issues. I will focus on Mixminion, a new
message-based anonymous remailer protocol and Onion Routing, a low-latency
stream-based anonymous communication system. I'll also spend some time
talking about the link padding / dummy traffic problem. Throughout, I'll
share some intuition about how to break these systems and how to fix them.