2 Aug 2004, 10:21 GMT -
Roger
Dingledine of the Free Haven Project gave the DefCon security
conference a briefing on the developing technology, which he calls Tor,
for The Onion Routing or Tor's Onion Routing.
Onion
routing combines "mix" anonymity services, where multiple messages are
mixed up before being sent, and "proxy" services, which provide
anonymity by providing one layer of indirection.
The idea is that users in a
peer-to-peer network proxy for and encrypt each other's traffic, with three layers of redirection between the two communicating nodes.
Dingledine
said the system, still under development, will provide anonymity but
with low latency. In tests, he said, a 60MB file downloaded in 300
seconds using Tor, compared to 210 seconds without it.