[tor-teachers] Lecturing about Tor in an InfoSec lecture

Nicolas Braud-Santoni nicolas.braud-santoni at iaik.tugraz.at
Mon Mar 7 18:58:40 UTC 2016


Hi,

I will be one of the lecturers involved in an InfoSec course (actually
called “Selected Topics in IT Security”) at Graz University of
Technology, aimed at Master-level students who already have the basic
baggage in infosec (including understanding of how cryptography is used,
for instance).

I have somewhere between 5 to 10h [0] that I would like to dedicate to
Tor.  I was planning to cover:
- overview of the network;
- threat model;
- mitigations in place, perhaps exemplified with a past attack.

There are a couple more things I want to talk about, but I will have to
make choices because of the time constraints:
- HS enumeration attack, what it implies, and an overview of proposal
224 (next generation onion services).
  This ties in very-nicely with the ”privacy-preserving cryptography”
part of the lecture, and it very interesting in its own right.
- global adversaries: this is a much thornier issue, and I'm not sure
what to say about it in a limited amount of time;
- HS applications: there has been lots of very cool “production”
applications published in the last 2 years (Onionshare, Ricochet and
SecureDrop, for instance) and it might be interesting to show students
what can be achieved with onion services and how.

Is this too optimistic with regards to the time I have?
Would some of you have feedback or experiences to share?


The course also has an associated practical, where students are asked to
define and implement a project related to one of the themes we covered. 
I'm pretty happy to say that a group of students already contacted me
about doing something Tor-related, and I have a couple of nice ideas
that would be upstreamable.  :-)


Best,

  Nicolas

[0] We are still defining the planning.

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