DEF CON 33 - Stories from a Tor dev - Roger 'arma' Dingledine
Source: YouTube · DEFCONConference · published Oct 10, 2025 · 42:42
Roger shares stories about Tor's development, challenges, and interactions with governments worldwide 0:37-1:02. He emphasizes that Tor's distributed trust architecture prevents any single point from knowing who did what, unlike centralized services 4:48-5:07.
Key Takeaways:
• Tor has been approached by governments requesting backdoors since as early as 2005 3:42-3:57
• Law enforcement agencies including the FBI and Secret Service use Tor for their operations 6:04-6:15
• Tor faced a significant DDoS attack from Russian cybercriminals in 2021, requiring technical countermeasures 16:16-18:04
• Iran's first censorship attempt blocked Tor based on a specific cryptographic parameter, not what developers expected 22:56-24:31
• Russian blocking of Snowflake accidentally took down all of Microsoft Azure for a day 28:33-31:26
Tor remains essential for privacy protection globally, with stories showing how people evading authoritarian regimes depend on it for their safety 36:40-36:57.
Sources:
- 0:37-1:02 Introduction to Roger's talk about Tor network stories
- 3:42-3:57 DOJ requesting a backdoor in 2005
- 6:04-6:15 FBI agents using Tor for their operations
- 16:16-18:04 DDoS attack on Tor network by Russian cybercriminals
- 22:56-24:31 Iran's first censorship attempt blocking Tor
- 28:33-31:26 Russia accidentally blocking all o
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First 800 characters of the transcript
Now, Roger here is going to share some wonderful stories. He has lots of stories and I've known him for a number of years. And he is like many of the other folks that are here. Way more approachable than you think. So, he's going to offer at the end to come and hang out, answer questions, come meet all of you. When he says that, he's genuine. Take this opportunity. Thank you for coming so often and thank you for always being so open and thank you for so being so friendly for everybody. Let's give Roger a big welcome, a big round of applause for everything that he's done for all of us. Good luck. >> Okay. Hi everybody. Is the microphone working? Seems like it is. Awesome. Okay. Hi, I'm Roger. Uh, and indeed the lights here are very bright, so I'm going to go like this every time I want to a…