Articles
Protocol explainers, measurement studies and guides to upstream research.
These articles assume you already know Tor and the basics of how networks work. They cover the protocols and cryptography behind privacy tools, measurement studies by the community, and guides to technical writing from upstream projects such as the Tor Project and OONI. If you are new to anonymity and privacy, start with the Docs. Community events and progress reports are in Updates.
2026
- Technical Design of Offline Reading and Local Encryption on the Docs SiteThe six Service Worker caches and the update strategy behind offline reading on the docs site, the two ways its passkey holds a key through user.id and PRF, and why local file encryption uses age.
- OONI Measurements of Northern Taiwan's 30-Minute Mobile Throttle on 13 AugustAn analysis of OONI's public data from the 30-minute mobile throttle in northern Taiwan on 13 August 2026, covering what the throttle looked like on a single device, how throttling and blocking differ in the data, the steps to reproduce each conclusion from the public API, and the questions this dataset cannot answer.
- Faulty Measurement Detection and Anonymous Credentials at OONIA guide to an OONI engineering post, covering the findings of four heuristic checks, proposed new detection methods, the principles for handling faulty measurements, and how the anonymous credential system scores trust without storing personal data.
- OONI Run v2 Usage Patterns, a Census of 336 LinksA census of the lifetime measurement counts of all 336 live OONI Run v2 links, where the Gini coefficient of 0.981 comes from, and why long-term observation depends on a continuously running measurement backend.
- Unredacted's Circumvention Infrastructure, Seen from TaiwanA guide to Unredacted's Tor Blog guest post on FreeSocks, Tor bridges and Snowflake across 300-plus servers, and GreenWare's 123 exit relays on roughly 400W, with notes on Taiwan's relay count, running GreenWare-style hardware in Taiwan, and ways to take part.
- Zero-Knowledge Identity and PaymentsRing signatures and RingCT in Monero, zk-SNARK shielded transactions in Zcash, the capabilities and limits of chain analysis, and zero-knowledge identity applied to private KYC, compliance disclosure, and anonymous donations.
- Post-Quantum CryptographyThe NIST standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat model, and how far browsers, cloud providers, messaging protocols, SSH, and financial regulators in the region have got with migration.
- End-to-End Encryption ProtocolsHow Diffie-Hellman, forward secrecy, the Double Ratchet, Sender Keys, and MLS work, the three strategies for multi-device sync, and the design trade-offs across Signal, MLS, SimpleX, and Session.
- Decentralized Website PublishingThe design trade-offs between self-hosting, CDNs, IPFS, and onion services, how content addressing differs from connection anonymity, and how the anoni.net docs site publishes three copies at once.
- Deployment Paths and Open Problems for Stateless Tor RelaysA guide to Osservatorio Nessuno's Tor Blog post A Server That Forgets, covering TPM-backed relay keys, three deployment paths and the unsolved engineering problems, with notes for relay operators in Taiwan.
- The Tor Sysadmin Team's Switch to Architecture Decision RecordsA summary of why Tor's system administration team (TPA) replaced RFCs with ADRs, a comparison with how other open source projects record decisions, and notes on decision records in Taiwan's projects and communities.
- OONI Probe's Anonymous Credential SystemA guide to OONI's announcement of its anonymous credential system for OONI Probe, covering the requirements, the Rust credential framework, the submit protocol and the Go integration, with design context from OONI's 2025 literature review and our own perspective.