About Arti

Arti is a project committed to delivering an embeddable, production-quality Rust implementation of the Tor anonymity protocols. It is a complete rewrite of the C tor codebase, and it is currently under active development.

Why rewrite Tor in Rust?

• Rust serves as the foundation of Tor's networking code as it provides better memory-related security properties than C.

  The surface area for potential vulnerabilities has been greatly diminished thanks to Rust's focus on memory safety. According to our estimations, Rust would make at least half of the past C tor security flaws we've identified impossible, and many more would have been extremely unlikely.

• Security is only one piece of the puzzle. It enables faster development than C.

  The expressiveness and safety guarantees of Rust have also been contributing factors to Arti's rapid development. Rust's language features enable us to write code more quickly. In the long run, we believe that this will not only speed up the development of our software but also result in higher quality software.

• Arti represents a design shift from our previous C tor implementation; it is more flexible than C tor.

  While the C tor implementation was initially designed as a SOCKS proxy, Arti was conceived from the ground up to function as a modular, embeddable library. This architectural difference is much more flexible, allowing Arti to integrate into various applications.

• A new codebase helps us write code with cleaner design principles.

  Arti reduces complex "spaghetti" relationships in the codebase by building on the lessons learned since the birth of C tor in 2002. With its focus on modularity and clarity, we hope that Arti is more readable and approachable to new developers.