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> On Jul 29, 2015, at 9:50 AM, Paul Syverson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Virgil, > >> On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 12:32:56PM +0000, Virgil Griffith wrote: >> intending to use Tor for? >> >> I know the classic story of US intelligence agents wanting to phone home >> from Beijing hotels without Chinese intelligence knowing they were phoning >> home as a partial motivation for open-sourcing Tor. >> >> But what was the Navy/military originally hoping to use Tor-related >> protocols for? It's unclear to me what their historical motivations were. > > If I'm understanding you, it's a question with a presupposition > failure. Nobody came to us and said, "We have this problem we're > encountering in the field. How would you solve it?" We (David, > Michael, and I) thought of an interesting research problem and > solution area that could also ultimately result in technology that > would be useful to the Navy. We then applied for funding to research it. > > We came up ourselves with potential application suggestions such as > open source intelligence gathering or "phoning home" as you put it. > We also came up with other ideas (some good, some bad) and also talked > to people about how it might be useful. As another example that I > remember from an early briefing slide: We knew about the 1991 pentagon > pizza channel > http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/government/a/war_and_pizza.htm > and we speculated that maybe in the future people would even be doing > incredible stuff like ordering food online (The Web was only two years > old at that point.) We had a picture where the ordering > information went over the Web from the Pentagon to Domino's and was > routed by an enemy (Iraq at the time of the putative pizza channel > concern). I remember a point I would make during presentations was > that the enemy could see the number of orders made by people at the > Pentagon to Domino's even if he couldn't break the encryption to know > if they were for pepperoni or extra cheese. (And this was years > before ShmooCon 2005 when Nick Mathewson uttered the immortal line: > "Look. Dan Kaminsky has just fit an entire meat-lover's pizza inside a > DNS request.") > > There is some more discussion of the history > of onion routing (including Tor) here > > http://www.acsac.org/2011/program/keynotes/syverson.pdf > > also, though the slides above are not in it (I'll have to look around) > for some other application ideas see > http://www.onion-router.net/Publications/Briefing-1996.pdf > (Note that in those slides we said onion routers were Chaum mixes > because when we told more experienced researchers about onion routing, > they told us these were a form of Chaum mixes (with which we were > initially unfamiliar). We didn't really articulate the important > differences till much later.) > > > HTH, > Paul > -- > tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] > To unsubscribe or change other settings go to > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
