Tor Browser and Onion Services – Challenges and Opportunities

Tor Project

Maintaining a browser like Tor Browser has its challenges but also its rewards. It allows us to reach faster adoption of important technologies like onion services, providing a more secure browsing experience for all Tor users. Improving the treatment of onion services on the browser side, however, comes with its own challenges both for users and service providers and it is important to reflect on those as a requirement for future growth. Thus, we feel it is time to take stock in this blog post and outline the steps we have taken over the years to improve the user experience and adoption of onion services, the challenges we faced and continue to face, and what the future might look like.

What does this mean and how did we get here?

Onions services are self-authenticating and provide integrity and confidentiality by default. That means once you are connected to an onion service you can be sure you are talking to the one you tried to reach and your data is not manipulated or read by Man-In-The-Middle-attackers. HTTPS was introduced over 20 years ago to provide some of those properties for plain web traffic (HTTP) when communicating with a server.

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