By: Conor Doherty and Kenneth Cabrera The Tor Network By: Conor Doherty and Kenneth Cabrera

What is the Tor Network? “The Onion Router” A distributed volunteer-based network which uses random pathways and encryption to prevent traffic analysis. “The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.” – The Tor Project Website

Project Topics What is the Tor Network? How does Tor function? How does Tor work to preserve anonymity? What are the limits and weaknesses of Tor? How much more secure is Tor than normal internet browsing?

Motivation Many people know of Tor but know nothing about Tor Exploitation of Tor for illegal activity “The Silk Road” “Cracking” of Tor by government agencies (NSA) Privacy and Anonymity becoming serious concern in an age where information is everywhere How can we protect ourselves and what are the limits of that protection?

Our Progress So Far Started by compiling a list of reputable sources Mainly doing background research on Tor What is it? How does it work? Etc. Started compiling a rough research document Compiles all research into one place Currently exploring weaknesses of Tor

Where our research is headed The focal point will be how much better Tor is than normal network browsing/message sending Looking more in depth into all topics discussed Try and discover the strengths as well as the weaknesses of Tor

Sources https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/471556/filename/TorBT.pdf http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/egotist ical-giraffe-nsa-tor-document