A Blog.

For those trying to keep their identity secret, there are few tools better than Tor. Its use of onion routing with one of the world's largest networks makes it difficult for an adversary to deanonymize users. That said, this anonymity comes at a cost. Namely, Tor's bandwidth and latency leave much to be desired. In a world where data is increasingly bought and sold, many internet users are looking to hide their browsing habits from their ISPs and web trackers. For these relatively small or disinterested adversaries, Tor is drastic overkill. An alternative for these users is a VPN, but they have their own set of drawbacks. In particular, most VPNs are either paid or ad-supported. For my intern research project, I chose to bridge the gap between Tor and VPNs. Background The project, dubbed Torantula (for reasons that will be apparent by the end of this post), was started as a more general imp