The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters included the U.S. In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor. In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development. The first public release occurred a year later. The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson and then called The Onion Routing project (which was later given the acronym 'Tor'), was launched on 20 September 2002. Onion routing is implemented by means of encryption in the application layer of the communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online. The core principle of Tor, onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. It protects the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor exit nodes.

Tor protects personal privacy by concealing a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity.

It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays. Tor, short for ' The Onion Router,' is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients.Overlay network, mix network, onion router, Anonymity application Unix-like, ( Android, Linux, BSD, macOS), Microsoft Windows, iOS

Tor project anonymity online