Paul Syverson is inventor of the onion routing approach to anonymous communication, for which he received the Edison Invention Award. He has designed several onion routing systems, including Tor, which was named one of the hundred best products of 2005 by PC World magazine. Dr. Syverson has been designing and analyzing security and privacy systems at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory for two decades. His work ranges from the design and application of logics for cryptographic protocol analysis and formalization of multilevel security in probabilistic systems to traffic analysis resistance and anonymous communication. He was program chair of the 2008 ACM Conference On Computer and Communications Security, and he has been chair of eight previous international conferences and workshops covering computer security, privacy, and cryptography. He is the author of one book on the foundations of logic, editor of several volumes on computer security and privacy, and author of many dozens of papers published in refereed conferences and journals. He is completing a forthcoming book on the science underlying anonymous communication. Dr. Syverson has served as director of international computer security organizations and has been a visiting scholar and guest lecturer at numerous universities and institutes in the U.S. and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in philosophy (logic), an M.A. in mathematics (all three from Indiana University), and an A.B. in philosophy from Cornell University.

Dr. Syverson will discuss ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION, a technology to protect the communications of government, law enforcement, intelligence gatherers, diverse coalitions, businesses, and individuals. Anonymous communications resist blocking of access to public networks and other forms of censorship, usage profiling and identity theft, service blocking (through server hiding), and other security threats. Dr. Syverson will describe these users and uses of anonymous communication. He will also describe basic concepts underlying anonymous communication, how it works, and protections it provides (and does not provide). While he will describe other types of anonymous communication, he will focus on Tor, an onion routing network that he co-designed. Tor is the largest anonymizing system ever built, with thousands of server nodes worldwide and hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.