[tor-talk] German University signs up 24 tor relays

[Sophie Hassfurther]

Hi,

nusenu:
> just in case if someone is wondering who caused this month's little
> spike in relaycount on 2015-05-01:
> https://metrics.torproject.org/versions.html
>
> The IP addresses are associated with a German University
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RWTH_Aachen_University, maybe
> they are doing some research?

Thanks for keeping an eye on the statistics!

I just looked at their official website
http://www.rwth-aachen.de/
and did a search for "tor" on both the German and the English version.
The English site produced a couple of useless hits (factor, doctoral,
etc.). The hits on the German site were not exactly more exciting,
mostly related to soccer :) "Tor" means goal in German.

The department for computer science has a different website [1] Their
annuals reports [2] show some interesting research on onion routing and
threat modeling.

in 2007 [3]
Olaf Landsiedel, Lexi Pimenidis, Klaus Wehrle, Heiko Niedermayer, Georg
Carle: Dynamic Multipath Onion Routing in Anonymous Peer-To-Peer Overlay
Networks, Proceedings of IEEE Globecom 2007, Washington D.C., November 2007.

and in 2011 [4]
Lukas Nießen: Website 
Fingerprinting
 in 
Anonymization

Networks:
Improved Methods
 and 
Evaluation 
of 
Countermeasures

The Chair for Computer Science 4 that conducted the research in 2011 is
called Communication and Distributed Systems (ComSys)
p 163 in of the annual report [4] "Research at ComSys focuses on the
development of flexible, scalable & resilient communication systems and
the required models, methods, and tools to design, analyse, realise, and
evaluate these systems."

Has anyone contacted them yet to ask what they are doing with those
relays? Or have they contacted anyone in the Tor project?

Sophie

[1] http://www.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/index_eng.php
[2] http://www.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Forschung/jabe.php
[3] http://www.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/FGI/Forschung/Jabe/jb2007_08.pdf
[4] http://www.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/FGI/Forschung/Jabe/jb2011.pdf