The Onion Routing Project (Tor) was developed in the mid-1990s by the United States Research Laboratory with the purpose of protecting US intelligence communications online, but today Tor is a free service that anybody can use to enable anonymous online communications. The system works by wrapping data in layers of encryption, hence onion, and sending it through several different routing nodes which remove a layer of encryption at each point until reaching the final destination, where the actual data is viewed by the target service. While the system is not full proof, it does a good job of hiding the source IP address from those who wish to track internet usage, such as governments. There are two types of website you can access through Tor; there are clear-net websites such as facebook.com which you can access through browsers like Chrome or Safari, and there are darknet websites such as facebookcorewwwi.onion which can only be accessed through the Tor browser. While using the Tor browser you can access either version of Facebook, with both having the same content, but the difference being the onion domain has gone through a process called “onionfication.” When you send data to a clear-net website it will eventually pass through an exit node, where the final layer of encryption is stripped away and the information is now viewable, and this final step is the biggest vulnerability of using Tor. All of the nodes on the Tor network are volunteer based meaning anybody can create their own exit node. Any large government organization could do this, including countries such as China, and monitor Tor traffic at the final stages in an attempt to find identifying information on citizens and their internet communications. The only way to completely negate this risk is through the onionfication of a website, which will allow data sent through the Tor network to be avoid exit nodes.