33 Facts About Tor Browser

Tor Browser's intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor Browser exit nodes.

The alpha version of Tor Browser, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson and then called The Onion Routing project, was launched on 20 September 2002.

Attacks against Tor Browser are an active area of academic research that is welcomed by The Tor Browser Project itself.

Tor Browser enables its users to surf the Internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously, and is used by a wide variety of people for both licit and illicit purposes.

Tor Browser is not meant to completely solve the issue of anonymity on the web.

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Tor Browser is not designed to completely erase tracking but instead to reduce the likelihood for sites to trace actions and data back to the user.

Tor Browser has been described by The Economist, in relation to Bitcoin and Silk Road, as being "a dark corner of the web".

Tor Browser aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the law.

Tor Browser aims to conceal its users' identities and their online activity from surveillance and traffic analysis by separating identification and routing.

Tor Browser periodically creates virtual circuits through the Tor Browser network through which it can multiplex and onion-route that traffic to its destination.

Applications whose traffic is commonly anonymized using Tor Browser include Internet Relay Chat, instant messaging, and World Wide Web browsing.

In 2012, LASTor Browser proposed a method to predict a set of potential ASes on these two segments and then avoid choosing this path during the path selection algorithm on the client side.

In October 2019, a Tor Browser researcher revealed that since at least 2017, there were hundreds of highly suspicious entry, relay, and exit nodes, run by an unknown group, in an unprecedented scale.

On 30 July 2014, the Tor Browser Project issued the security advisory "relay early traffic confirmation attack" in which the project discovered a group of relays that tried to de-anonymize onion service users and operators.

The Tor Browser automatically starts Tor background processes and routes traffic through the Tor network.

Onion Browser is open-source, privacy-enhancing web browser for iOS, which uses Tor.

Tor Browser has been praised for providing privacy and anonymity to vulnerable Internet users such as political activists fearing surveillance and arrest, ordinary web users seeking to circumvent censorship, and people who have been threatened with violence or abuse by stalkers.

Tor Browser receives funding from NGOs including Human Rights Watch, and private sponsors including Reddit and Google.

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.

Critics say that Tor is not as secure as it claims, pointing to U S law enforcement's investigations and shutdowns of Tor-using sites such as web-hosting company Freedom Hosting and online marketplace Silk Road.

In October 2013, after analyzing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, The Guardian reported that the NSA had repeatedly tried to crack Tor Browser and had failed to break its core security, although it had had some success attacking the computers of individual Tor Browser users.

When Tor Browser users are arrested, it is typically due to human error, not to the core technology being hacked or cracked.

In March 2011, The Tor Browser Project received the Free Software Foundation's 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

In June 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden used Tor Browser to send information about PRISM to The Washington Post and The Guardian.

In October 2014, The Tor Browser Project hired the public relations firm Thomson Communications to improve its public image and to educate journalists about the technical aspects of Tor Browser.

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In July 2015, the Tor Browser Project announced an alliance with the Library Freedom Project to establish exit nodes in public libraries.

The pilot program, which established a middle relay running on the excess bandwidth afforded by the Kilton Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, making it the first library in the U S to host a Tor node, was briefly put on hold when the local city manager and deputy sheriff voiced concerns over the cost of defending search warrants for information passed through the Tor exit node.

Tor Browser was fundamental to the operation of the darkweb marketplace AlphaBay, which was taken down in an international law enforcement operation in July 2017.

Tor Browser came out strongly against the raid against its support organization, which provides legal and financial aid for the setting up and maintenance of high-speed relays and exit nodes.

Since October 2018, Chinese online communities within Tor Browser have begun to dwindle due to increased efforts to stop them by the Chinese government.

The Tor Browser Project has appealed to Russian courts over this ban.

Tor Browser responded to earlier vulnerabilities listed above by patching them and improving security.

For example, Tor warns its users that not all traffic is protected; only the traffic routed through the Tor browser is protected.