HOT is a made-up short for the Swedish project name ‘Hoppet till Tor’, roughly translatable to ‘The hope/jump to Tor’. This project focuses on the first connection from a user’s computer into the Tor network. The goal of this project is to experimentally evaluate and customize one or more pluggable transports for Tor to protect against website fingerprinting attacks.

HOT is funded by the Swedish Internet Fund and runs for one year, starting January 2016.

The project participants are Tobias Pulls and Stefan Lindskog at Karlstad University together with Philipp Winter and Nick Feamster at Princeton University.