[tor-reports] PETS 2016 Reportback

[isis agora lovecruft]

Open Technology Fund Community Lab: PETS 2016 Travel Report
Darmstadt, Deutschland: 17-24 July, 2016
Isis Agora Lovecruft, The Tor Project

Summary
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
The Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) [0] is a conference for
privacy and anonymity researchers to present recent developments in their
field.  This year, it was held in conjuction with the Security and Privacy
Week, [1] which included numerous other conferences and events, including
CrossFyre, a cryptography and security conference for young women (those who
identify with other genders were welcome too).

Event Overview
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
For the most part, I attended only PETS and HotPETS sessions.  I live-tweeted
most of the ones I attended (along with my colleague Nick Mathewson), and I've
created a collection of tweets covering the hilights. [3] For the rest of the
coverage, see the #pets16 hashtag. [4]

Proceedings
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
Prior to the event, I reviewed many of the PoPETS (the quarterly academic
journal run by PETS) paper submissions.  Several of these were pertinent to my
interests.  I'm not supposed to say which ones I reviewed, and I find this
requirement to be in harsh conflict with cross-community open discussion of
ideas.  This may be the only time I'll ever be opposed to anonymity, but
academia's manditorily-"anonymous" submission/review system should be destroyed.

For the actual proceedings, I refer the reader again to the tweets linked.
The coverage there is actually quite good.

In between sessions, I was also fortunate to have several meetings with
researchers who have ideas and proposals for Tor.

I met with Philipp Jovanovic and several of Philipp's colleagues from EPFL to
discuss a proposal for using collective signatures as an external mechanism
for validating Tor's consensus documents.  The report-back from that
discussion is available here. [5]

I also met with Peter Schwabe (Radboud Univerity Nijmegen), Nick Mathewson
(also The Tor Project), John Schanck (one of the NTRU developers), and Trevor
Perrin (Open Whispersystems), to discuss the various draft proposals for
post-quantum secure handshakes for Tor, and the prospects for using Trevor's
Noise Protocol [6] to define hybrid post-quantum cryptographic constructions.
This meeting resulted in John's proposal for a generic, pluggable handshake
construction being merged, [7] as well as mine and Peter's NewHope-based
proposal. [8]

[0]: https://petsymposium.org/2016/
[1]: https://www.securityweek2016.tu-darmstadt.de/spw2016/
[2]: https://www.crossfyre2016.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/de/home/
[3]: https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/timelines/761262834445611008
[4]: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pets16+-amazon+-etsy+-puppy+-dog+-dogs+-petfood+-cat+-cats+-kitty+-kitten
[5]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-July/011222.html
[6]: http://noiseprotocol.org/
[7]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/commit/proposals?id=cd8ad93a
[8]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/commit/proposals?id=64b6b72d

Best regards,
-- 
 ♥Ⓐ isis agora lovecruft
_________________________________________________________
OpenPGP: 4096R/0A6A58A14B5946ABDE18E207A3ADB67A2CDB8B35
Current Keys: https://fyb.patternsinthevoid.net/isis.txt
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