Tor Anonymous Network

The Tor Project develops free software and maintains a distributed overlay network that enables anonymous communication, protecting users from traffic analysis and surveillance. Founded in 2006 as a non-profit organization, with the original onion routing research conducted at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s, Tor is the most widely used anonymity network globally with millions of daily users. Key features include: onion routing (traffic is encrypted in multiple layers and routed through three randomly selected volunteer-operated relays (guard, middle, and exit), with each relay decrypting only one layer to know the previous and next hop, preventing any single relay from knowing both source and destination), Tor Browser (hardened Firefox fork with HTTPS-only mode, NoScript integration, anti-fingerprinting, canvas randomization, and uniform user-agent strings to blend in with other users), hidden services (onion services with .onion addresses providing server anonymity through six-hop circuits, used by news sites, messaging platforms, and marketplaces), pluggable transports (obfs4, Snowflake, meek, and WebTunnel bridges that disguise traffic as other protocols to bypass censorship), directory authorities (ten trusted directory servers that maintain consensus on the network status), and bridges (unlisted relays for users in censored regions).