Presented at
DEF CON 33 (2025),
Aug. 9, 2025, 1 p.m.
(45 minutes).
What is it actually like to support and balance a global anonymity network, with users ranging from political dissidents to national security analysts? You say it's important to teach law enforcement and governments about privacy and end-to-end encryption, but how do those conversations go in practice? I heard you accidentally got Russia to block all of Azure for a day? Are you ever going to do a Tor talk in China? Wait, who exactly tried to bribe you to leave bugs in Tor to support their criminal schemes?
Historically I've tried to downplay some of the excitement from operating the Tor network and teaching the world about Tor, but this year I'm going to try my hand at the "war stories" track.
References:
- Talking to law enforcement and governments over the years.
- [link](https://blog.torproject.org/talking-german-police-stuttgart/)
- [link](https://blog.torproject.org/trip-report-october-fbi-conference/)
- [link](https://blog.torproject.org/trip-report-tor-trainings-dutch-and-belgian-police/)
- [link](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/talk-by-roger-dingledine-of-torprojectorg-at-the-nsa/2013/10/04/cdd15234-2d1d-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html) aka [link](https://archive.is/meQic)
- Tor network denial-of-service issues + fixes
- [link](https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/2667)
- [link](https://research.torproject.org/techreports/dos-taxonomy-2015-10-29.pdf)
- Tor's onion service NFT
- [link](https://blog.torproject.org/nft-auction-and-whats-next/)
Presenters:
-
Roger "arma" Dingledine
Roger Dingledine is co-founder and original developer of the Tor Project, a nonprofit that develops free and open source software to protect people from tracking, censorship, and surveillance online. Roger works with journalists and activists on many continents to help them understand and defend against the threats they face, and he is a lead researcher in the online anonymity field. EFF picked him for a Pioneer Award, and Foreign Policy magazine chose him as one of its top 100 global thinkers.
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