Hello Tor supporters!

What alternative protocol architectures and route selection protocols would offer acceptable gains in Tor performance? Would they preserve Tor properties? Is it possible to improve Tor performance without changing protocols? Is it truly possible to deploy Tor at scale? And what would the full integration of Tor and Firefox look like? Those are some of the questions that Mozilla is calling researchers to answer in the privacy & security part of their Mozilla Research Grants program.

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.

The goal of our study is to understand your expectations, assumptions, and habits when browsing onion services. For example, we are wondering: How do you keep track of onion domains? How do you discover new onion services? How do you know an onion service is legitimate and not an impersonation? By answering these questions, we can identify usability issues and build better anonymity technology.