The Tor Project, the group behind the anonymous Tor browser and related services, has announced that it’s working on a new, more secure version of the technology that will make the anonymous browsing promised by the technology truly anonymous again.

Although Tor is best-known publicly for providing access to the dark net and the various criminal enterprises that can be found there, the service is designed to allow users to browse the internet and host sites anonymously to bypass censorship and monitoring in countries with regressive controls over internet access. Tor, whose name is derived from “The Onion Router,” does this through encrypted protocols known as onion routing. A volunteer overlay network consists of computers connected to the internet that are used to conceal a user’s location and usage.

Problems with how the platform, now 10 years old, protects user anonymity started appearing in 2014 when a report found that 81 percent of people using Tor could be identified. The Tor Project denied security issues at the time, but three years later, it now concedes that the protocol used has issues that need to be fixed.

The new version, which is currently in alpha testing, sees the deployment of new “cutting-edge crypto algorithms and improved authentication schemes,” with the protocol end of a data request on the network being redesigned to defend against info leaks by reducing “the overall attack surface.” That includes making a given user’s onion address completely private to the end user.

For users, very little will change, but one noticeable feature is that new onion domain names will be longer. For example, instead of facebookcorewwwi.onion, a new address may be as long as 7fa6xlti5joarlmkuhjaifa47ukgcwz6tfndgax45ocyn4rixm632jid.onion.

The development team promises more going forward, saying that once the new changes settle down, it’s looking to add features such as offline service keys, advanced client authorization, a control port interface, improved guard algorithms, secure naming systems, statistics, mixed-latency routing and blockchain support.

Existing users of Tor need not worry that their current access will be affected by the changes for now. The team added that it doesn’t want to to “destabilize the current onion community,” so it’s “not planning to kill the legacy system just yet.” The implication is that the existing network will be replaced at some point in the future, but a timetable was not given.

Photo: imageme/Flickr