[tor-talk] Structured Information on Tor

[Matthew Finkel]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 03:30:15AM -0400, sVYVGcT5jfBv9vnfL0Ey wrote:
> Hey Guys!

Hi! It's great you're interested this! Just so you know for next time,
as a matter of respect for everyone on this list, we use "y'all" or
"everyone" (or something similar).

> 
> I am a total Tor-Newbie and wanted to know if there is any structured source of information, like in a 200-page book or so, that teaches me everything important? Most of the information I could find is scattered over many sites. I downloaded a few papers from freehaven, which is super interesting, but it is also quite academical information.

Unfortunately, no. There isn't an all-inclusive book about Tor. This is
partly due to no one having any spare time for working on it, and partly
due to Tor evolving so quickly the book would be outdated before it
reached the publishing presses (along with some other reasons). The
current Tor documentation page [0] has nearly all the details you need,
but it's spread across multiple locations.

There are high-level overviews and lower-level specifications, but we are
missing a middle-level description.

The specifications are the core documentation for the different
components. If you want something high-level you can look at [0]
section (a) and the EFF's "Tor and HTTPS" website [1]. If you need more
details about how this all works, [0] section (k) has links for the
various parts of Tor. In particular, the Tor Design paper (The Second
Generation Onion Router) is still relevant, although many parts of Tor
today are different. There is a series of blog posts from a few years
ago describing updates since that paper was published [2][3][4]
(although some of that information is now old, too).

Section (i) at [0] has links for some interesting videos, too.

[0] https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation
[1] https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/top-changes-tor-2004-design-paper-part-1
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/top-changes-tor-2004-design-paper-part-2
[4] https://blog.torproject.org/top-changes-tor-2004-design-paper-part-3

I hope this helps,
Matt