Tor - The Onion Router

Lately Iíve been hearing a lot about Tor (The Onion Router). Tor is an anonymous Internet communication system initially designed and developed as part of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Routing program with support from ONR and DARPA. Tor anonymizes web communications including browsing, publishing, instant messaging, IRC and SSH and also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.
Tor uses a distributed group of network of servers, called onion routers that allow data packets to take a random pathway through a series of Tor servers on the web. These servers anonymously pass traffic between each other so network traffic analysis cannot tell where the data came from or where it's going.
Tor is distributed as free software and could be an interesting student project. Downloads, overviews, links and lots of good Tor information can be found at the website and the source of this blog: http://tor.eff.org/