Who Created Tor? The Origins of Onion Routing

Tor, short for The Onion Router, was originally created in the mid-1990s by employees at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to protect government communications. Mathematician Paul Syverson, along with computer scientists David Goldschlag and Michael G. Reed, invented the underlying “onion routing” technology. This framework was later expanded in the early 2000s by computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, who transformed the military project into the open-source privacy network known today as the Tor Project.

The Inventors of Onion Routing

In 1995, the U.S. military recognized that internet traffic could be intercepted and analyzed to compromise intelligence operations. Even if messages were encrypted, eavesdroppers could still see who was communicating with whom.

To solve this problem of traffic analysis, David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson developed onion routing at the NRL, with funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The technology worked by wrapping internet data in multiple layers of encryption—like the layers of an onion. The data passed through a series of network nodes, each peeling away a single layer of encryption to reveal only the next destination. Consequently, no single node ever knew both the original source and the final destination of the data.

The Evolution into the Tor Project

While the U.S. Navy created the technology, government anonymity required a diverse user base. If only military personnel used the network, any traffic originating from it could easily be identified as government activity. For the system to be truly secure, the public needed access to the same network.

In 2002, MIT graduates Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson teamed up with Paul Syverson to develop the next-generation onion routing protocol, officially naming it “Tor.”

Open Source and Public Release

In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free and open-source license. Around the same time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) stepped in to provide financial backing to support Dingledine and Mathewson in maintaining the project.

In December 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and several others officially founded The Tor Project, Inc., a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit based in Massachusetts. Today, The Tor Project maintains and develops the software, supported by a global community of volunteers and a mix of private donations and research grants.