Month: December 2010

Jacob Appelbaum‘s new vision — to create a “home Internet with anonymity built in” — is featured in MIT’s Technology Review magazine. Jacob is a UW security and privacy lab research scientist and core Tor developer. His key idea is to integrate the Tor anonymity system directly into wireless routers, thereby making strong privacy more accessible to the general public. UW security researcher Alexei Czeskis and others from the Tor community are also participating in this project. Good luck Jacob and Alexei with this new direction!

The New York Times Magazine has a detailed article on online anonymity and the Tor project. UW security researcher and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum is extensively quoted. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, Tor now helps protect the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the Skein cryptographic hash function as one of five finalists in its SHA-3 competition. The winner will become the new U.S. hash function standard. Sixty-four proposed hash function designs were submitted to NIST when the competition began two years ago. Skein was designed by a team of cryptographers and computer security experts, including UW’s Yoshi Kohno. (If you look closely, you’ll notice that the team photo was taken in the beautiful halls of the UW Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.)