They plant some courier moles to relay back on who's sending lockboxes and who they're for. Courier C knows what the item was, and who it was sent to, but not who sent it originally.Īfter you use this method enough times, a nosey organization wants to know what's going on.Courier B knows a lockbox passed by but has no idea who originally sent it (you) or where it's headed (your recipient).Courier A knows you sent an item, but doesn't know who the end recipient is.One courier can't deduce that you sent an item to your recipient. The best part about this method is that no courier has the complete story.

Courier C opens up Lockbox C to reveal the addressed item, which Courier C delivers. Then, Courier B unlocks Lockbox B to reveal Lockbox C, addressed to Courier C.Ĭourier B delivers it to Courier C.

Courier A unlocks it to reveal Lockbox B, which is addressed to Courier B. For the final step, you send Lockbox A's key to Courier A, Lockbox B's key to Courier B, and Lockbox C's to Courier C.

For sake of clarity, let's call the largest box Lockbox A, the middle-sized one Lockbox B, and the smallest one Lockbox C. Now you have a Russian nesting doll situation with a lockbox inside a lockbox, which too is inside a lockbox. Finally, you put this double-lockbox into an even bigger one and lock that. You put this lockbox into a larger one, lock it, then write Courier B's address on that. You put this in a lockbox, lock it, then write Courier C's address on it. Then, you take the item you want to send and address it to your recipient. The item will be addressed to the courier's destination. When they get the chest, they must unlock it with their key and take out the item within. You tell each one that they'll receive a chest and a key to unlock it. To achieve this, you first hire three couriers-let's call them Courier A, B, and C. You don't even want the couriers of your item to know you sent an item to this person specifically. To better understand how onion routing works, let's say you want to send an item to someone, but you don't want anyone to know that it was you who sent it. The Tor network uses onion routing to preserve its users' privacy, but how does it work?

Tor project hopes complex fragile code