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The Tor Project, Inc. is a
Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region o ...
-based
501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of ...
research-education
nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
founded by computer scientists
Roger Dingledine Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he contin ...
,
Nick Mathewson Nick Mathewson is an American computer scientist and co-founder of The Tor Project. He, along with Roger Dingledine, began working on onion routing shortly after they graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 2000s. ...
and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.


History

The Tor Project was founded in December 2006 by computer scientists
Roger Dingledine Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he contin ...
,
Nick Mathewson Nick Mathewson is an American computer scientist and co-founder of The Tor Project. He, along with Roger Dingledine, began working on onion routing shortly after they graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 2000s. ...
and five others. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ...
(EFF) acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S.
International Broadcasting Bureau The International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) is the technical support outlet within the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) (former Broadcasting Board of Governors, BBG), which is a U.S. independent agency. The IBB supports the day-to- ...
, Internews,
Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human ...
, the
University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
,
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet. In October 2014, The Tor Project hired the public relations firm Thomson Communications in order to improve its public image (particularly regarding the terms "Dark Net" and "hidden services") and to educate journalists about the technical aspects of Tor. In May 2015, The Tor Project ended the Tor Cloud Service. In December 2015, The Tor Project announced that it had hired
Shari Steele Shari Steele is a technologist, lawyer, and activist for digital freedom. She worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the legal director and then executive director, as well as at The Tor Project as the executive director. Career S ...
, former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as its new executive director. Roger Dingledine, who had been acting as interim executive director since May 2015, remained at The Tor Project as a director and board member. Later that month, The Tor Project announced that the
Open Technology Fund The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is an American nonprofit corporation that aims to support global Internet freedom technologies. Its mission is to "support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, an ...
would be sponsoring a
bug bounty program A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites, organizations and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to security exploits and vulnerabiliti ...
that was coordinated by
HackerOne HackerOne is a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform that connects businesses with penetration testers and cybersecurity researchers. It was one of the first companies, along with Synack and Bugcrowd, to embrace and utilize crowd-sou ...
. The program was initially invite-only and focuses on finding vulnerabilities that are specific to The Tor Project's applications. On May 25, 2016 Tor Project employee
Jacob Appelbaum Jacob Appelbaum (born 1 April 1983) is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. He studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology and was a core member of the Tor project, a free software networ ...
stepped down from his position; this was announced on June 2 in a two-line statement by Tor. Over the following days, allegations of sexual mistreatment were made public by several people. On July 13, 2016, the complete board of the Tor Project – Meredith Hoban Dunn,
Ian Goldberg Ian Avrum Goldberg (born March 31, 1973) is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL (with David Wagner), and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint (formerly Zero Knowledge Syst ...
, Julius Mittenzwei, Rabbi Rob Thomas,
Wendy Seltzer Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and a staff member at the World Wide Web Consortium, where she is the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group. She was previously with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Se ...
,
Roger Dingledine Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he contin ...
and
Nick Mathewson Nick Mathewson is an American computer scientist and co-founder of The Tor Project. He, along with Roger Dingledine, began working on onion routing shortly after they graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 2000s. ...
– was replaced with
Matt Blaze Matt may refer to: * Matt (name), people with the given name ''Matt'' or Matthew, meaning "gift from God", or the surname Matt *In British English, of a surface: having a non-glossy finish, see gloss (material appearance) * Matt, Switzerland, a ...
,
Cindy Cohn Cindy Cohn is an American civil liberties attorney specializing in Internet law. She represented Daniel J. Bernstein and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in ''Bernstein v. United States''. Education She received her undergraduate degree ...
,
Gabriella Coleman Enid Gabriella Coleman (usually known as Gabriella Coleman or Biella; born 1973) is an anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on cultures of hacking and online activism, particularly Anonymous. She previously held the Wolfe Chai ...
, Linus Nordberg,
Megan Price Megan E. Price is Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She collects and analyses data to investigate violations to human rights. Early life and education Price studied statistics at Case Western Reserve University. She ...
and
Bruce Schneier Bruce Schneier (; born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Cente ...
. A new anti-harassment policy has been approved by the new board, as well as a conflicts of interest policy, procedures for submitting complaints, and an internal complaint review process. The affair continues to be controversial, with considerable dissent within the Tor community. In 2020, due to the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
, the Tor project's core team let go of 13 employees, leaving a working staff of 22 people.


Funding

, 80% of The Tor Project's $2 million annual budget came from the
United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a feder ...
, with the
U.S. State Department The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other n ...
, the
Broadcasting Board of Governors The United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), is an independent agency of the United States government that broadcasts news and information. It describes its mission, "vital to US nation ...
, and the
National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
as major contributors, "to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states". The
Swedish government The Government of the Kingdom of Sweden ( sv, Konungariket Sveriges regering) is the national cabinet of Sweden, and the country's executive authority. The Government consists of the Prime Ministerappointed and dismissed by the Speaker of th ...
and other organizations provided the other 20%, including
NGO A non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-governmental organisation (see spelling differences) is an organization that generally is formed independent from government. They are typically nonprofit entities, and many of them are active in h ...
s and thousands of individual sponsors. Dingledine said that the
United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...
funds are more similar to a research grant than a procurement contract. Tor executive director Andrew Lewman said that even though it accepts funds from the U.S. federal government, the Tor service did not collaborate with the NSA to reveal identities of users. In June 2016, The Tor Project received an award from
Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, ...
's Open Source Support program (MOSS). The award was "to significantly enhance the Tor network's metrics infrastructure so that the performance and stability of the network can be monitored and improvements made as appropriate."


Tools

* Metrics Portal ::Analytics for the Tor network, including graphs of its available bandwidth and estimated userbase. This is a great resource for researchers interested in detailed statistics about Tor. * Nyx ::a terminal (command line) application for monitoring and configuring Tor, intended for command-line enthusiasts and ssh connections. This functions much like top does for system usage, providing real time information on Tor's resource utilization and state. * Onionoo ::Web-based protocol to learn about currently running Tor relays and bridges. * OnionShare ::An open source tool that allows users to securely and anonymously share a file of any size. * OONI ( Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)) ::a global observation network, monitoring network censorship, which aims to collect high-quality data using open methodologies, using Free and Open Source Software (FL/OSS) to share observations and data about the various types, methods, and amounts of network tampering in the world. *
Orbot Orbot is a free software Proxy server project to provide anonymity on the Internet for users of the Android operating system. It acts as an instance of the Tor network on such devices and allows traffic routing from a device's web browser, em ...
::Tor for Google Android devices, in collaboration with The Guardian Project * Orlib ::a library for use by any Android application to route Internet traffic through Orbot/Tor. * Pluggable Transports (PT) ::helps circumvent censorship. Transforms the Tor traffic flow between the client and the bridge. This way, censors who monitor traffic between the client and the bridge will see innocent-looking transformed traffic instead of the actual Tor traffic. * Relay Search ::Site providing an overview of the Tor network. * Shadow ::a discrete-event network simulator that runs the real Tor software as a plug-in. Shadow is open-source software that enables accurate, efficient, controlled, and repeatable Tor experimentation. * Stem ::Python Library for writing scripts and applications that interact with Tor. * Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) ::a live CD/USB distribution preconfigured so that everything is safely routed through Tor and leaves no trace on the local system. * Tor ::free software and an open network that helps a user defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. The organization has also implemented the software in Rust named Arti. *
Tor Browser Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...
::a customization of Mozilla Firefox which uses a Tor circuit for browsing anonymously and with other features consistent with the Tor mission. *
Tor Phone Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia ...
: : :: ::A phone that routes its network traffic through tor network. Initially based on
CopperheadOS CopperheadOS is a mobile operating system for smartphones, based on the Android mobile platform. It adds privacy and security features to the official releases of the Android Open Source Project by Google. CopperheadOS is developed by Copperhead ...
custom ROM, similar efforts continue in CalyxOS,
DivestOS DivestOS is a free operating system (OS) based on the Android mobile platform. It is a soft fork of LineageOS that aims to increase security and privacy, and support older devices. As much as possible it removes proprietary Android components ...
,
GrapheneOS GrapheneOS (formerly Android Hardening or AndroidHardening) is an Android-based, open source, privacy and security-focused mobile operating system for selected Google Pixel smartphones. History The main developer, Daniel Micay, originall ...
and other independent ROMs. * TorBirdy ::Torbutton for Thunderbird and related *bird forks. * txtorcon ::Python and Twisted event-based implementation of the Tor control protocol. Unit-tests, state and configuration abstractions, documentation. It is available on PyPI and in Debian.


Recognition

In March 2011, The Tor Project received the
Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ( ...
's 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit. The citation read, "Using free software, Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity. Its network has proved pivotal in dissident movements in both
Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
and more recently
Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...
." In September 2012, The Tor Project received the 2012
EFF Pioneer Award The EFF Pioneer Award is an annual prize by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for people who have made significant contributions to the empowerment of individuals in using computers. Until 1998 it was presented at a ceremony in Washington, ...
, along with Jérémie Zimmermann and Andrew Huang. In November 2012, ''
Foreign Policy A state's foreign policy or external policy (as opposed to internal or domestic policy) is its objectives and activities in relation to its interactions with other states, unions, and other political entities, whether bilaterally or through ...
'' magazine named Dingledine, Mathewson, and Syverson among its Top 100 Global Thinkers "for making the web safe for whistleblowers". In 2014, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson received the USENIX Test of Time Award for their paper titled "Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router", which was published in the ''Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium'', August 2004.


See also

*
Tor Phone Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia ...


References


External links

*
Old website


web.archive.org/web
Tor Weekly News — August 27th, 2014
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tor Project, The . Computer science organizations Computer security organizations Internet privacy organizations Organizations based in Cambridge, Massachusetts Organizations based in Seattle Non-profit organizations based in Massachusetts 501(c)(3) organizations Scientific organizations established in 2006 2006 establishments in Massachusetts Science and technology in Massachusetts Tor onion services