A technique for obfuscating the true origin of packets on an IP network in order to preserve privacy and shield a user’s online activities from monitoring by government, corporate or other entities. Onion routing hides online activity by sending packets through a distributed network of randomly selected proxy serversbefore they are delivered to their final destination.
Onion-routed packets are securely encrypted, with the packets unwrapped by a symmetric encryption key at each server, peeling off the layers of the message a server at a time. Onion routing was originally developed by the U.S. Navy, and the Navy has financed the development of a second-generation onion routing project known as Tor.
