On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 01:29:06PM -0500, Nicholas R. Parker (RIT Student) wrote:

I'm working with a small group over at RIT that's starting to get some things together to do research on/for the TOR project for the purpose of understanding how it works better and (in the long run) doing work on trying to both find weaknesses and contribute positively to the operation of the project.

Seeing as how we're just getting off the ground now, our goal is first to build an isolated TOR network that we can do our work on. I'm reaching out for your know-how and was hoping you could point us in the right direction in terms of how to go about setting such a system up.

The tool you want is probably chutney. It sets up a testing Tor network where everything is running on a single machine. (Some versions of chutney support setting up across multiple machines.) But this list is mainly about running public Tor relays at universities. Perhaps you want one of the other lists instead? - Ian