The Tor Project, Inc. is a

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-based

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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, Nick Mathewson 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, Nick Mathewson 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 c ...

(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,

Internews Internews Network, now Internews, is a 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in California, formed in 1982. It was founded by David M. Hoffman, Kim Spencer, and Evelyn Messinger. The president and CEO is Jeanne Bourgault. Internews Europe is an ...

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 r ...

, the

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, 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, 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 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 vulnerabilit ...

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 crow ...

. 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 network d ...

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, 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. Sel ...

, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson – was replaced with Matt Blaze, Cindy Cohn, Gabriella Coleman, Linus Nordberg, Megan Price 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 Center ...

. 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 identif ...

, 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

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, with the U.S. State Department, the

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, and the

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as major contributors, "to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states". The Swedish government and other organizations provided the other 20%, including NGOs 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 secur ...

funds are more similar to a

research grant A grant is a fund given by an end entity grant – often a public body, charitable foundation, or a specialised grant-making institution – to an individual or another entity (usually, a non-profit organisation, sometimes a business or a loca ...

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, w ...

'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 ::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 con ...

::a customization of Mozilla Firefox which uses a Tor circuit for browsing anonymously and with other features consistent with the Tor mission. * Tor Phone : : :: ::A phone that routes its network traffic through tor network. Initially based on CopperheadOS custom ROM, similar efforts continue in

CalyxOS CalyxOS is an operating system for smartphones based on Android with mostly free and open-source software. It is produced by the Calyx Institute as part of its mission to "defend online privacy, security and accessibility." CalyxOS preserves ...

, DivestOS, GrapheneOS 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

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'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

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and more recently

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Medite ...

." 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.

References

External links