FAU-Informatics-Tor-FAQ

Frequently asked questions regarding the FAU’s Department of Computer Science support for the Tor Network

The Department of Computer Science of FAU supports the Tor Anonymity Network in many ways. This site gives answers to frequent questions arising in this context.

What is the Tor Network?

Tor is a free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication over regular Internet connections. It directs a user’s Internet traffic via a free, worldwide volunteer overlay network (the Tor Anonymity Network) that consists of thousands of relays.

Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user’s Internet activity. Tor protects personal privacy by concealing a user’s location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. Learn more about the Tor network at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

What is the Tor Project?

The Tor Project is a research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, New Hampshire, USA. It is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.

How is FAU involved in the Tor Project?

A former student and current research associate of FAU, Sebastian Hahn, is operating a relay on behalf of FAU. This relay provides a service to all users of the Tor Network by providing additional capacity for anonymizing traffic.

In addition, FAU provides hosting for (but does not operate) one of the central directory servers and related services, which provide the backbone of the Tor network. Felix Freiling and Matthias Bauer are providing administrative support. The computing resources are provided by the Department of Computer Science.

Why does FAU’s Department of Computer Science support the Tor Project?

Next to being a tool that supports basic human rights on the Internet, Tor is also a tool to perform research, e.g. in the fields of Internet measurement, privacy enhancing techniques, anonymous communication, online data leakage, censorship resilience and censorship awareness. FAU performs research in many of these fields, e.g., in the groups of Felix Freiling and Rüdiger Kapitza.

Research helps Tor, but can you give examples of how Tor supports research?

Here are some examples of papers that have used Tor as research tool or research object and are of general interest to computer science. The list is by no means meant to be exhaustive. More references on research involving Tor can be found in the bibliography “Selected papers on Anonymity”.

  • New Covert Channels in HTTP: Adding Unwitting Web Browsers to Anonymity Sets, by Matthias Bauer. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2003), 2003.
  • SoK: Making Sense of Censorship Resistance Systems, by Sheharbano Khattak, Tariq Elahi, Laurent Simon, Colleen M. Swanson, Steven J. Murdoch, and Ian Goldberg. In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2016(4), October 2016.
  • Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration: A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians, by Andrea Forte, Nazanin Andalibi, and Rachel Greenstadt. In the Proceedings of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), March 2017.
  • Understanding Tor Usage with Privacy-Preserving Measurement, by Akshaya Mani, T Wilson-Brown, Rob Jansen, Aaron Johnson, and Micah Sherr. In the Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (IMC ’18), October 2018.
  • Tempest: Temporal Dynamics in Anonymity Systems, by Ryan Wails, Yixin Sun, Aaron Johnson, Mung Chiang, and Prateek Mittal. In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2018(3), June 2018.

Are there projects at FAU that use or investigate Tor?

Several projects at FAU have performed research related to Tor. Here is a short and incomplete list:

  • The Privacy&Us Innovative Training Network (Privacy&Us), funded December 2015 to September 2020 by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 675730, within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN-ETN) framework.
  • Graduiertenkolleg 2475 “Cyberkriminalität und Forensische Informatik” (Cybercrime), funded from October 2019 to March 2024  and April 2024 to September 2028 by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).