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Title: Secure Web Access: Onion Routing and Self-Authentication

Speaker: Paul Syverson, U.S. Naval Research Lab

For the Talk slides Please click here
For the talk Video on YouTube please click here

Date: September 7, Monday

Time: 16:15– 17:45 (Israel, UTC+03:00)
14:15 – 15:45 (UK, UTC+01:00)
09:15 – 10:45 (EDT UTC-04:00)
23:15 – 00:45 (AEST UTC+10:00)

Abstract: In this course, I will give a basic overview of onion routing, Tor, and onion services—popular means to improving the security and privacy of sites and the users accessing them. I will discuss motivational examples, basic design, and models of adversaries and trust. I will also describe onion services, which are accessible via Tor Browser, and how to extend their self-authenticating features to traditional addresses accessible from ordinary browsers via ordinary internet routing. Lastly I will describe how these self-authenticating traditional addresses offer improvements over both existing systems for usable onion services and the web’s certificate revocation infrastructure.

Bio: Paul Syverson—inventor of onion routing, creator of Tor, author of one book and over one hundred refereed papers, chair of many security and privacy conferences, aspiring unicycle commuter—holds multiple advanced degrees in philosophy and mathematics. Paul is a founder of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium and the ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society. He is an EFF Pioneer and an ACM Fellow. During his three decades as Mathematician at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory he has also been a visiting scholar at institutions in the U.S. and Europe.