Tor is an anonymity network synonymous with what's going on on the dark side of the web.
Many websites are inside the dark web, including many large publishers and also the likes of Facebook have their own onion websites. Their purpose, is to avoid censorship, and also meet the increasing people's demand on privacy.
What's more, the cryptocurrency ecosystem also uses Tor to perform private transactions and mining.
With the Tor browser, users can wander the deep web for information far greater than the surface web.
Read: Deep Web And The Dark Web: Venturing Into The Unknown
But the technology is over than a decade old. In terms of technology, that's a very long time. What's more, governments and hackers are increasingly targeting Tor's anonymous system. This is why Tor Project, the group behind Tor, is working on an update, which should strengthen security and keep data anonymized in ways better.
After four years developing the project, Tor is releasing the next generation of its anonymous onion network in an alpha release.
The next generation of onion uses cutting-edge crypto algorithms and improved authentication schemes. On the protocol end, the group redesigned the directory system to defend against information leaks and reduce the overall attack surface. Onion addresses are made completely private and only known to the owner and whoever the owner chooses to disclose it to.
And on the engineer's perspective, the new protocol is more extensible and features a cleaner codebase.
The next generation of onion won't be noticeable to Tor users, though the .onion domain names would be longer.
The Tor Project said that as the current code stabilizes, more features will be added in the future, including advanced client authorization, improved guard algorithms, and offline service keys.
While more bugs are squashed and extra features are added to the new iteration, Tor keeps the legacy union system running and is still making it the default option. While the user base migrates to the next generation, Tor plans to push the switch and make the next generation the default.
And if the Tor community welcomes the change, it will phase out the legacy system entirely,