The twenty-first century has brought with it a disturbing loss of personal privacy. Communications are routinely monitored for content and traffic analysis can be used to determine which IP addresses are exchanging meaningful amounts of traffic. Onion routing is a technique by which a subset of all network nodes are tasked with relaying encrypted traffic for clients. Tor is a widely used implementation of an onion routing protocol which defends against traffic analysis
attacks; it also implements hidden services only reachable from within the Tor darknet. Tor is endorsed by a number of human rights and advocacy organizations, including as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and Wikileaks.org. Tor is also used by the US Department of Defense and the US Military.

The presentation will describe the origins of Tor as well as how the darknet functions. The threat model Tor was designed under will be discussed, and a demonstration will be given of how to set up the client, middleman and exit nodes. A demonstration of how to set up a web server as a hidden service will also be given. Operational security for clients as well as routing nodes will be detailed.

Questions will be taken after the presentation.

BIO:
Bryce A. Lynch has worked as a system administrator, security engineer, and consultant for fifteen years in the public and private sectors. He is interested in cryptography, privacy and anonymity technologies, electronics, music of all kinds, security research and penetration testing. His other hobbies include designing and building synthesizers, constructing biofeedback devices, tailoring, and writing code that other people can't make heads or tails of. When stuck in traffic he has been known to sing beltway karaoke and hold animated conversations with himself as a problem solving technique. He is the partner of one wife,
no children or pets, seven computers, and too many books. His sense of humor is implemented in LOGO, and he is actually very shy.