“Anonymity is considered a big part of freedom of speech now,” says Albert Kwon, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and one of the paper’s first authors.

At the Usenix Security Symposium this summer, they will show that an adversary could infer a hidden server’s location, or the source of the information reaching a given Tor user, by analyzing the traffic patterns of encrypted data passing through a single computer in the all-volunteer Tor network.įortunately, the same paper also proposes defenses, which representatives of the Tor project say they are evaluating for possible inclusion in future versions of the Tor software. Researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have now demonstrated a vulnerability in Tor’s design. For more than a decade, people living under repressive regimes have used Tor to conceal their Web-browsing habits from electronic surveillance, and websites hosting content that’s been deemed subversive have used it to hide the locations of their servers. With 2.5 million daily users, the Tor network is the world’s most popular system for protecting Internet users’ anonymity.

Using tor browser on college wifi