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Arti: Frequently Asked Questions
What is Arti?
Arti is a project to rewrite the entire codebase of the Tor anonymity network in Rust.
Arti is also the name of the software produced by this project.
What is the status of Arti today?
As of March 2022: Arti is ready for experimental use by developers interested in embedding Tor support in their projects. Arti can run as a simple Tor client and send anonymized traffic over the network, but it has no support for running as a relay or for using onion services.
Before Arti is ready for production use, we need to make sure that it has all the important security features from the C Tor implementation; we need to improve its performance; and we need to improve its APIs based on user requirements. We hope to have this done for our 1.0.0 milestone in September 2022.
(After that, our 1.1 milestone will focus on anticensorship work, and 1.2 will focus on support for onion services.)
Should I use Arti?
As of March 2022: You should only use Arti as a client if you are interesting in helping us experiment and find bugs.
If you are interested in shipping Arti as part of your own application, you should start experimenting with it now, so that you can let us know what features and APIs are missing for you, and we have a chance to add them.
Will Arti replace the C Tor implementation?
Eventually, yes. But it will take a lot of work.
We plan to maintain and support the C Tor implementation until Arti is a viable replacement for the vast majority of use cases. We estimate that this will take us several more years, at the least. Even then, we plan to continue supporting the C Tor implementation for some while, to give people time to switch.