Paul Syverson, a computer scientist working with the US Naval Research Academy, is widely credited as being the inventor of Onion Routing. Onion Routing, the underlying anonymity technique for Tor, was initially developed in the mid-1990s by the US Navy for confidential government communications. Image Courtesy: Wikipedia Origins and Implementations This is what enables privacy and allows the sender to remain anonymous. It means no intermediary knows both the origin and final destination of the data. The original message remains hidden while being transferred from one node to the next. It is then decrypted one layer at a time at every exit node it passes through, before being fully decrypted for the final exit node – the website or service you’re trying to access. This makes it incredibly difficult for would-be eavesdroppers to trace the original sender.Īll communication is hidden behind multiple layers of encryption at the original entry node (your computer). Unlike regular proxies or VPNs, which typically use a single server to route your communication, onion routing uses multiple (largely crowdsourced) servers. Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network by using a series of random “nodes”, or servers, to relay messages. It also prevents the ISP or others from snooping on the user’s online activities.

It does so by using ‘onion routing’ – an anonymity technique that transmits data through a series of layered nodes, or servers, to hide the user’s IP address from not only the website or service being accessed, but also government agencies and organizations trying to monitor network traffic. Short for ‘The Onion Router’, it is a secure, encrypted networking protocol to ensure online privacy. Tor is an open-source, decentralized privacy network that enables users to browse the web anonymously.

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