What HiddenForge Is

The short version

HiddenForge is a container that turns any web app you already have into a Tor onion service. You run it next to your app, and it publishes a .onion address that people reach through the Tor network. Your app itself never opens a port to the internet, so there is nothing to scan, nothing to connect to directly, and nothing that reveals where the server lives.

The problem it solves

Normally, putting a site on Tor means installing Tor on your server, hand-writing a torrc config, getting the file permissions right, and remembering all the hardening steps that keep the setup from leaking. Miss one and you can expose the server's real IP address, or leave the service open to the kind of flooding that knocks onion sites offline.

HiddenForge does that setup for you and gets the hardening right by default. You give it your app and a port. It gives you an address.

What you actually get

• A version 3 .onion address for your service, generated on first run and kept for as long as you keep its key file.
• Your backend stays private. It sits on an internal network with no route to the internet and no published ports. Only Tor, running in the same setup, can reach it.
• Flood protection on by default: proof-of-work defenses and intro-point rate limiting, the same mechanisms Tor added to keep busy onion sites reachable under attack.
• The Vanguards addon, which defends against a class of attacks that try to discover the guard relays your service uses (a step toward finding the server).
• A build you can check and reproduce yourself rather than trust blindly (see Verifying the Image).

Who it's for

• Anyone who wants a site, API, or file drop reachable over Tor without exposing the host.
• People who run a normal Docker or Podman setup and want the Tor side handled for them.
• Operators who care about the details and want to read exactly what the container does before they rely on it. That is what the rest of this wiki is for.

What it is not

• It is not a way to browse anonymously. It publishes a service; it is not a client proxy for your own traffic. The SOCKS proxy is turned off on purpose.
• It is not a magic anonymity button. It protects the network path to your server. It cannot fix a web app that leaks your identity in its content, a server that is already compromised, or an operator who reuses a real name. See OPSEC: Mistakes That Deanonymize You for the parts that are on you.
• It is not a relay or exit node. It is configured to never carry other people's Tor traffic.

Where to go next

If you want it running now, go to the Quickstart. If you want to understand what it does before you run it, read How It Works.