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
