Hello, Zcash Community Grants Community!
I am Alex, Team Lead of The Tor Project’s Network Team – the team responsible for implementing the Arti Rust implementation of Tor. The team has some excellent news for you all!
We are delighted to let you know that we have completed the final deliverables of our grant with you guys.
With the release of Arti 1.4.0, we are officially opening our external RPC/FFI interface to third-party developers. Alongside the RPC interface, we have also developed a lightweight C library, enabling non-Rust applications to integrate with Arti. Moving forward, we will gather feedback from both existing and new third-party developers who have been waiting for the RPC layer to be ready. With this release, we therefore believe we have concluded milestone 2 of our grant.
The release announcement, including some information about the RPC and FFI layer, can be read at Arti 1.4.0 is released: onion services, RPC, relay development, and more | The Tor Project – in addition to the release from this month, we also hope people have seen our blog post on the anti-Denial of Service work that we completed back in November last year at Memory quota tracking in Arti, for Onion Service DoS resistance | The Tor Project
In addition to the big technical changes in the February release of Arti, we are pleased to announce that we have published our new version of the Arti website at https://arti.torproject.org/ . This site will become the entry point for internal and external developers interested in the ecosystem we are trying to build with Arti. With this update, we are concluding the deliverable of milestone 4. We especially want to thank our friends at DocumentWrite who helped us build the infrastructure around our documentation website as part of this grant.
From the start, Arti was a very “high risk, high reward” project. And to be honest, we were not entirely sure if we could pull it off. The C implementation of Tor has absolutely stood the test of time, but we could also see how difficult it was to maintain it and how much time we spent doing relatively small features. Your grants have brought an optimistic vision into reality: it’s now significantly easier to implement large and complex features in the Arti codebase than what even our very senior C Tor programmers could do with our old implementation of Tor. This is something that will have significant impact for the Tor development and privacy ecosystem in the years to come, both internally and for external application developers.
While this project took longer than expected, we are left with an incredible feeling of accomplishment to look back at both this project and the first grant we received from you. When we initially reached out to the Zcash community, our expectation of where we would be today was to have a relatively minimal implementation of the Tor protocol in Rust. Instead, what we have now is a very capable set of Rust libraries that has allowed us to build the Arti client itself, do prototype work on our VPN application and build analysis software around the Tor ecosystem; we have seen 3rd party developers announce libraries to more easily build in-application Onion Services using popular HTTP crates in the Rust ecosystem without ever having to interact with us. We cannot help but be incredibly proud of what we have produced in addition to the initial proposal over the last couple of years, and it wouldn’t have been possible without your trust and support.
Stable and flexible funding is imperative for the entire Internet Freedom and privacy movement of which Tor is a part, and we cannot thank you enough for providing this opportunity for us to get Arti out in the hands of people who need safe, anonymous, and private access to the internet even in situations where they are experiencing censorship. We are continuously looking for future grants to do more features with Arti itself, but we also have project proposals ready for building tooling with Arti as a library, amongst others, for our Network Health Team, which works on keeping the Tor Network safe and free of attackers. If ZCG is interested in continuing this partnership, we are excited to share more about what we can do together moving forward.
Again on behalf of both myself and my team, but also the greater Tor community: thank you!
All the best,
Alex