To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding.[1]
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.[13]
In May 2015, the Tor Project ended the Tor Cloud Service.[14][15]
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.[16][17][18] Later that month, the Tor Project announced that the Open Technology Fund would be sponsoring a bug bounty program that was coordinated by HackerOne.[19][20] The program was initially invite-only and focuses on finding vulnerabilities that are specific to the Tor Project's applications.[19]
On May 25, 2016, Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum stepped down from his position;[21][22][23] this was announced on June 2 in a two-line statement by Tor.[24] Over the following days, allegations of sexual mistreatment were made public by several people.[23]
On July 13, 2016, the complete board of the Tor Project – Meredith Hoban Dunn, Ian Goldberg, Julius Mittenzwei, Rabbi Rob Thomas, Wendy Seltzer, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson – was replaced with Matt Blaze, Cindy Cohn, Gabriella Coleman, Linus Nordberg, Megan Price and Bruce Schneier.[25][26][27][28] 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.[29][30] The affair continues to be controversial, with considerable dissent within the Tor community.[31]
In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tor project's core team let go of 13 employees, leaving a working staff of 22 people.[32]
In 2023, the Tails Project approached the Tor Project to merge operations. The merger was completed on September 26, 2024, stating that, "By joining forces, the Tails team can now focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of The Tor Project."[33][34]
Funding
Tor Project Contributions: Fiscal Year 2023–2024[35]
In April of 2023, the Tor Project announced a partnership where Tor Borwser developers would create the Mullvad Browser.[39] While all corporate contributions combined made up 3.4% of the Tor Project's 2021–2022 budget,[40]as of 2024[update], Mullvad contributes 19% of the project's budget, making it the second largest single contributor (after the DRL).[35]
A significant portion of the Tor Project's funding is from individual donors.[35] Despite making up less than government and corporate funds, Tor Project places a high value on individual donations, as they are made without restrictions on what the funding may be used for, granting greater flexibility for project priorities. The project often frames donations in terms of a "Bug Smash Fund", as the donations are used to fix software bugs left outside the scope of other sources of funding.[41]
Tools
Metrics Portal
Analytics for the Tor network, including graphs of its available bandwidth and estimated user-base. 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.
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.
Tor for Android and iOS devices, developed and maintained 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.
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.[42]
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 the Tor network.[43] Now defunct.
TorBirdy
Extension for Thunderbird and related *bird forks to route connections through the Tor network.
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.[44]
Recognition
In March 2011, the Tor Project received the Free Software Foundation'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 and more recently Egypt."[45]
In November 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Dingledine, Mathewson, and Syverson among its Top 100 Global Thinkers "for making the web safe for whistleblowers".[47]
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.[48]
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