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December 2025

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Feedback System for the Tor Browser
by Bruno Melo 05 Dec '25

05 Dec '25

Hello Tor Developers, My name is Bruno, and I am currently doing my Thesis under the guidance of professor Kevun. My Thesis focuses on developing a system to enable users to submit anonymous reports on usability issues experienced while using the Tor Browser. To do so, I studied the state of the art in private data collection and analyses, and compared all the most relevant solutions between each other. This research led me to the POPSTAR protocol, a system that enables the submission of reports protected by k-anonymity. In this system, reports are constructed in a manner that the Server collecting them is unable to decrypt any single report individually. Instead, it must aggregate groups of similar reports. Each report contains a secret share of the symmetric key for the given group. When a group reaches threshold k, the server is able to combine the shares in order to recover the symmetric key, and therefore perform decryption of the group. The protocol does not require cooperation between clients. It only requires the clients to communicate with two non-colluding servers, a Randomness Server, which provides entropy to construct the report, and lastly the Aggregation Server, which collects the reports and attempts to decrypt them. We implemented this system in Rust, with the required Servers as Onion Services. Professor Kevun also provided me with a Browser Extension he has been working on as the interface for this system. In this email, I include the URL for the github repository, so that you can have a look, and run a demo. If you are interested, I can follow up this email with a document explaining the protocol in more detail. Here is the URL for the repository: github <https://github.com/Reidasfestas/AnonymousReportingForTor.git> Thank you very much for your time, and I hope to hear back from you.

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