Research

Research Groups

Interested to find other anonymity researchers? Here are some researchers and research groups you should take a look at.

Traffic Security Group of the Formal Methods Section, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Location
Washington, DC, USA
Key People
Rob Jansen, Aaron Johnson , Paul Syverson, Matt Traudt, Ryan Wails

Onion routing and Tor were invented at NRL, and researchers in the Formal Methods Section continue to investigate ways to improve communications privacy in general and Tor in particular. Topics of recent activity include improving Tor’s performance (e.g. congestion handling and bandwidth measurement), improved Tor’s security (e.g. improved guard-selection algorithms), improved onion services (e.g. single onion services and onion-service naming), and better Tor measurements (e.g. PrivCount and onion-service statistics). In addition, the Shadow network simulator is developed and maintained by the group.

Additional links

Publications

Information Security Research Group, University College London

Location
London, United Kingdom
Key People
Emiliano De Cristofaro, Steven Murdoch, George Danezis

The group comprised expertise across all filed of security, cryptography and privacy, including the study of anonymous communications, traffic analysis, censorship resistance, measurement studies, and privacy related cryptography. In related areas the group studies human factors and usability of privacy systems, genetic privacy, infrastructure privacy and abuse in online communities and media.

Additional links

Publications

Nick Hopper, University of Minnesota

Location
Minneapolis, MN, USA
Key People
Nick Hopper, Current Students

The group has worked on several projects seeking methods to improve Tor's performance and to understand the degradation of anonymity resulting from these methods. This includes understanding attacks on and improvements to many mechanisms used by Tor to improve performance, including load balancing, admission control, congestion control, hidden services, circuit selection, and circuit scheduling. We have also worked on accurately measuring and modeling the Tor network. Our group developed shadow, a network emulator that allows accurate large-scale simulations of Tor's performance and security, and developed algorithms for producing accurate reduced-scale models of the network. We have recently worked to develop methods for privately measuring improved models of Tor network traffic. Finally, the group has recently worked on understanding the limitations of website fingerprinting attacks and possible mitigation strategies.

Additional links

Publications

Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) Research Group, University of Waterloo

Location
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Key People
Ian Goldberg, All members

The CrySP research group at the University of Waterloo has been researching privacy-preserving communications networks for over a decade. They work on improving the security, privacy, and performance of such networks, and a number of their results have been incorporated into the Tor network. They also work on improved testbeds for Tor experimentation, including Shadow and NetMirage. The group maintains the CrySP RIPPLE Facility, a large experimentation testbed for privacy enhancing technologies like Tor; the largest single machine in the facility has 144 CPU cores and 12 TB of RAM.

Additional links

Publications

Center for Cybersecurity, Rochester Institute of Technology

Location
Rochester, NY, USA
Key People
Directed by Matthew Wright

The group explores website fingerprinting attacks and defenses in Tor, primarily based on deep learning techniques.

Additional Links

GitHub

Other groups

Add your group

If your research group, in industry or academia, is involved in research on Tor then please send a mail to research@torproject.org with the details you would like to have added.