[tor-talk] Tor is anti-censorship software

[Paul Syverson]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 01:18:11AM -0700, Spencer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> >
> >Paul Syverson:
> >the meaning of technical terms
> >
> 
> So that I may verify and understand meaning, what terms?
> 

'Anonymity', more specifically communications anonymity. (As I've
already said, I think "anonymity" is somewhat misleading as a term for
practical low-latency traffic security systems because it generally is
used to imply at least soem kind of uncertainty amongst a known given
set. But often for realistic systems the set is neither fixed nor
known.  I talked about this in "Why I'm not an Entropist". There are
multiple definitions used in the research literature, several even if
you limit yourself to ones that are just some type of entropy (shannon
entropy, min entropy, etc.)  Rather than argue about whether or not
something is _anonymous_ according to some imagined platonic form of
anonymity or some such, specify operating environment (network model,
etc.), usage model, adversary model, and security definition. Then
describe how secure a given system is in that context. That's often
hard to do fully for practical systems but the closer you come the
more reliable your statement is. What you want to call it doesn't
matter (except it kind of does because people will quite reasonably
apply their intuitions and prior knowledge to try to understand you ;>)

aloha,
Paul