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research.wml

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#include "head.wmi" TITLE="Tor: Research" CHARSET="UTF-8"

<h2>Tor: Research</h2>
<hr />

<p>
Many people around the world are doing research on how to improve the Tor
design, what's going on in the Tor network, and more generally on attacks
and defenses for anonymous communication systems. This page summarizes
the resources we provide to help make your Tor research more effective.
The best way to reach us about research is through the <a href="<page
contact>">tor-assistants</a> list.
</p>

<ul>

<li>
<b>Data.</b>
We've been <a href="http://metrics.torproject.org/data.html">collecting
data to learn more about the Tor network</a>: how many relays and
clients there are in the network, what capabilities they have, how
fast the network is, how many clients are connecting via bridges,
what traffic exits the network, etc. We are also developing
tools to process these huge data archives and come up with
<a href="http://metrics.torproject.org/graphs.html">useful
statistics</a>.  For example, we provide a <a
href="https://gitweb.torproject.org//ernie.git?a=blob_plain;f=doc/manual.pdf">tool
called Ernie</a> that can import relay descriptors into a local database
to perform analyses. Let us know what other information you'd like to
see, and we can work with you to help make sure it gets collected safely
and robustly.
</li>

<li>
<b>Analysis.</b>
If you're investigating Tor, or solving a Tor-related problem,
<i>_please_</i> talk to us somewhere along the way &mdash; the earlier
the better. These days we review too many conference paper submissions
that make bad assumptions and end up solving the wrong problem. Since
the Tor protocol and the Tor network are both moving targets, measuring
things without understanding what's going on behind the scenes is going
to result in bad conclusions. In particular, different groups often
unwittingly run a variety of experiments in parallel, and at the same
time we're constantly modifying the design to try new approaches. If
you let us know what you're doing and what you're trying to learn,
we can help you understand what other variables to expect and how to
interpret your results.
</li>

<li>
<b>Measurement and attack tools.</b>
We're building a <a
href="http://metrics.torproject.org/tools.html">repository</a> of tools
that can be used to measure, analyze, or perform attacks on Tor. Many
research groups end up needing to do similar measurements (for example,
change the Tor design in some way and then see if latency improves),
and we hope to help everybody standardize on a few tools and then make
them really good. Also, while there are some really neat Tor attacks
that people have published about, it's hard to track down a copy of
the code they used. Let us know if you have new tools we should list,
or improvements to the existing ones. The more the better, at this stage.
</li>

<li>
<b>In-person help.</b>
If you're doing interesting and important Tor research and need help
understanding how the Tor network or design works, interpreting your
data, crafting your experiments, etc, we can send a Tor researcher to
your doorstep. As you might expect, we don't have a lot of free time;
but making sure that research is done in a way that's useful to us is
really important. So let us know, and we'll work something out.
</li>

</ul>

<a id="Groups"></a>
<h2><a class="anchor" href="#Ideas">Research Groups</a></h2>

<p>Interested to find other anonymity researchers? Here are some
research groups you should take a look at.</p>

<ul>
<li>Ian Goldberg's <a href="http://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/">CrySP</a> group
at Waterloo.
</li>
<li><a href="http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/">Nick Hopper</a>'s
group at UMN.
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.hatswitch.org/~nikita/">Nikita Borisov</a>'s
group at Illinois.
</li>
<li>Matt Wright's <a href="http://isec.uta.edu/">iSec</a> group at
UTA.
</li
</ul>

<a id="Ideas"></a>
<h2><a class="anchor" href="#Ideas">Research Ideas</a></h2>

<p>
If you're interested in anonymity research, you must make it to the
<a href="http://petsymposium.org/">Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Symposium</a>. Everybody who's anybody in the anonymity research world
will be there. The 2010 conference is in Berlin in July. Stipends are
available for people whose presence will benefit the community.
</p>

<p>To get up to speed on anonymity research, read <a
href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/">these papers</a> (especially the
ones in boxes).</p>

<p>We need people to attack the system, quantify defenses,
etc. See the "Research" section of the
<a href="<page volunteer>#Research">volunteer</a> page.</p>

</div>

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