A peel of onion

Onion routing was invented more than fifteen years ago to separate identification from routing in network communication. Since that time there has been much design, analysis, and deployment of onion routing systems. This has been accompanied by much confusion about what these systems do, what security they provide, how they work, who built them, and even what they are called. Here I give an overview of onion routing from its earliest conception to some of the latest research, including the design and use of Tor, a global onion routing network with about a half million users on any given day.