Millions of people rely on a network of unpaid volunteers to stay anonymous online, and for 25 years that network has run on altruism rather than profit. Tor, short for The Onion Router, routes a user’s traffic through three volunteer operated relays, as many as 9,000 of them scattered across the globe, so no single relay knows both who is asking and where they are going.
At the DEF CON security conference, Tor Project cofounder Roger Dingledine walked through the operational lessons behind keeping that network running, covering routing design, bad actor detection, and a centralization problem tied to the economics of cheap hosting. He also reiterated that the goal of Tor is about privacy, not profit.
“The building block that Tor is based on is altruism,” Dingledine said. “It is: I want to make the world a better place, I have these extra resources, whether it’s bandwidth or a computer or something, and of course I’m going to give back to my community so that people in authoritarian regimes like Egypt or the U.S. or wherever we’re going, can have more safety on the internet.”
