Tor Community Projects

The Tor community of software and services aims to make your Internet experience safer and better.

Onionshare icon

OnionShare is an open source tool that lets you securely and anonymously share a file of any size.

SecureDrop icon

SecureDrop (secrdrop5wyphb5x.onion) is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz and is now managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Globaleaks icon

GlobaLeaks is an open-source, free software intended to enable secure and anonymous whistleblowing initiatives. The software is developed by the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights.

ChatSecure is a messaging application for iOS which allows OTR and OMEMO encryption for the XMPP protocol. ChatSecure is free and open source software available under the GNU General Public License. ChatSecure also features built-in support for anonymous communication on the Tor network.

Cwtch icon

Cwtch is an extension of the metadata resistant protocol Ricochet to support asynchronous, multi-peer group communications through the use of discardable, untrusted, anonymous infrastructure.

Warning: Cwtch is an experimental prototype. Please do not use it for anything where security, privacy, or anonymity is critical.

Ricochet icon

Ricochet IM is an open-source, decentralized instant messenger project that utilities the Tor network by design. It starts a Tor onion service on the users local system and facilitates communication with other Ricochet users who are also running their own Ricochet-created Tor onion service, providing End-to-End encryption by never allowing the connection to leave the Tor network.

Warning: On some operating systems, Ricochet ships with Tor 0.2.8.9. Tor 0.2.8.9 has several known onion service security issues, including TROVE-2016-12-002 and later. Tor 0.2.8 has not been supported since 1 January 2018. Please update to a supported tor version before launching Ricochet. Development stalled in November 2016, though it has been relatively stable in the time since.

See also our wiki page Torify HOWTO / Instant Messaging

Ahmia Icon

Ahmia (msydqstlz2kzerdg.onion) is open-source search engine software that indexes, searches, and catalogs content published on Tor Onion Services. Furthermore, it is an environment to share meaningful insights, statistics, insights, and news about the Tor network itself. In this context, there is a lot of work to do.

The Ahmia web service is written using the Django web framework. As a result, the server-side language is Python. On the client-side, most of the pages are plain HTML. There are some pages that require JavaScript, but the search itself works without client-side JavaScript.

OONI Icon

Orchid is a Tor client implementation and library written in pure Java. Orchid runs on Java 5+ and the Android devices. It can be used to Tor-ify Java and JVM applications with near transparency. In a basic use case, running Orchid will open a SOCKS5 listener which can be used as a standalone client where Tor would otherwise be used.

See our list of other Tor implementations

HTTPS Everywhere icon

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox and Chrome extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.

NoScript Icon

NoScript allows JavaScript, Flash (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site). This whitelist based pre-emptive blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown).

bine is a Tor controller written in Go. Its README has an example config to set up an onion service.

carml icon

carml is a command-line collection of utilities to query and manipulate a running Tor. It does terminal colours, plays nicely with grep, pipes and so forth and is easily extensible.

Whonix Icon

Whonix is a Debian GNU/Linux based security-focused Linux distribution. It aims to provide privacy, security and anonymity on the internet. The operating system consists of two virtual machines, a "Workstation" and a Tor "Gateway", running Debian GNU/Linux. All communications are forced through the Tor network to accomplish this.

OnionBalance provides load-balancing and redundancy for Tor hidden services by distributing requests to multiple backend Tor instances. source

As of September 2018 support for Next-Generation Onion Services was in development.

Deprecated Community Projects

Following projects have been useful in the past but are no longer maintained and may have security issues.
They can still be interesting for developers.

Tor-ramdisk is an i686 uClibc-based micro Linux distribution whose only purpose is to host a Tor server in an environment that maximizes security and privacy. Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Security is enhanced in Tor-ramdisk by employing a monolithically compiled GRSEC/PaX patched kernel and hardened system tools.

Roster is a Tor project that awards points and badges to relay operators based on the performance of their families

OnionTip is a web app which parses Tor relay data to allow users to tip volunteers for running relay in a fair and open way. https://oniontip.com

Cupcake Bridge helps users making bridges automagically with a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox

Tor Tip

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