We're holding a follow-up meetup to continue our discussions from our last meetup in July. If you want to learn more about Tor or running a relay, we'll be available to help with that, too.

We’re grateful to have the support of a dedicated volunteer base who help us to make Tor the strongest privacy tool out there, and we’re highlighting their work in this series. We want to thank Sina Rabbani, one of the co-founders (and former CTO) of Access Now, a nonprofit dedicated to defending users’ digital rights, for his years of support to Tor and to the internet freedom movement.

We are in the final stages of finalizing our new support portal, just one portal of many new sites to come in our website redesign. In order to finish it, we need to translate it from English into more languages. At the very least, we want to translate it to Farsi, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, German, Korean, Turkish, Italian, Arabic, French, and Spanish. If you are knowledgeable about another language not listed here, we'd be grateful for your help as well.

This installment will feature a Q&A with our incoming Executive Director, Isabela Bagueros. We'll start with a brief introduction on Tor, then Isa will highlight a few things we've been up to and give an overview of her vision for the organization as she prepares to become the Tor Project's ED at the end of this year.

The purpose of this post is to discuss what good research needs to do in order to ensure it has the best chance of being adopted by Tor, or any other large software project.

We have structured this post in terms of an ordered list of goals for research. Each successive goal is more difficult to accomplish than the previous one. At the end of this post, we will look at a positive example of excellent research that successfully accomplished all of these goals and give overall takeaways.

This post is meant to update the list of open Tor research problems, to bring focus to specific areas of research that the Tor Project thinks are necessary/useful in our efforts to upgrade and improve the Tor network and associated components and software. It is organized by topic area: network performance, network security, censorship circumvention, and application research. Each topic area provides information about current and desired work and ideas. We conclude with information about doing ethical and useful research on Tor and with suggestions on how to best ensure that this work is useful and easy for us to adopt.

Fixing the guard discovery problem in Tor itself is an immense project -- primarily because it involves many trade-offs between performance and scalability versus path security, which makes it very hard to pick good defaults for every onion service. Because of this, we have created an add-on that can be used in conjunction with a Tor onion service server or a Tor client that accesses Tor onion services.