[talks] Nick Jones MSE talk

[Melissa M. Lawson]

Nick Jones will present his MSE talk on Friday May 4 
at 3PM in Room 402.  the members of his committee are: 
Michael Freedman, advisor, and Ed Felten, reader.  Everyone 
is invited to attend his talk.  His abstract follows below.
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Internet censorship and surveillance have made anonymity tools increasingly critical for free and open Internet access. Tor, and its associated ecosystem of volunteer traffic relays, provides one of the most secure and widely-available means for achieving Internet anonymity today. Unfortunately, Tor has limitations, including poor performance, inadequate capacity, and a susceptibility to wholesale blocking. Rather than utilizing a large number of volunteers (as Tor does), we propose moving onion-routing services to the “cloud” to leverage the large capacities, robust connectivity, and economies of scale inherent to commercial datacenters. This paper describes Cloud-based Onion Routing (COR), which builds onion-routed tunnels over multiple anonymity service providers and through multiple cloud hosting providers, dividing trust while forcing censors to incur large collateral damage. We discuss the new security policies and mechanisms needed for such a provider-based ecosystem, and describe our implementation of the COR system. At today’s prices, a user could gain fast, anonymous network access through COR for only pennies per day.