What is Tor?
The Tor project is a non-profit organisation that conducts research and development into online privacy and anonymity. It is designed to stop people including government agencies and corporations learning your location or tracking you.
Based on that research, it offers a technology that bounces internet users’ and websites’ traffic through “relays” run by thousands of volunteers around the world, making it extremely hard for anyone to identify the source of the information or the location of the user.
why tor?
If you want to be anonymous—say, if you live under a dictatorship, you’re a journalist in an oppressive country, or a hacker looking to stay hidden from the government—Tor is one of the easiest ways to anonymize your traffic, and it’s free.
On a more general level, Tor is useful for anyone who wants to keep their internet activities out of the hands of advertisers, ISPs, and web sites. That includes people getting around censorship restrictions in their country, police officers looking to hide their IP address, or anyone else who doesn’t want their browsing habits linked to them.
Tor’s technology isn’t just about browsing anonymously. It can also host web sites through its hidden services that are only accessible by other Tor users. It’s on one of these hidden service sites that something like The Silk Road exists to traffic drugs. Tor’s hosting capabilities tend to pop up in police reports for things like child pornography and arms trading, too.
Tor has proven itself. However, there are several critical things to know about what TOR can and cannot do for you. The name itself refers to both a piece of software you can run on your machine, and to a large network of routers on which your Internet traffic can bounce in order to be anonymized. In order to understand how that works, let’s start with a typical proxy.
When you open a VPN from your computer to a server, whether that be into your work machine or a client on the other side of the country, you basically open an encrypted tunnel between those two points. Using a protocol like PPTP, SSL or L2TP, you’re configuring your computer’s TCP/IP stack to send all your traffic to a specific gateway, an Internet address, encapsulated into an encrypted payload. The proxy server then receives that payload, decrypts it, and inside finds the original packet, such as your web request to your bank, the email you want to send, or that file you’re trying to share. The important thing to understand is how the VPN connection encapsulates everything you do online into an encrypted tunnel between yourself and a single server, before decrypting these packets and sending them off.
While this is great to foil a local attacker such as at an open Hotel wi-fi connection, it does nothing against ISP-level snooping , who can easily go upstream of your VPN server and tap everything that comes out. Also, because you always use the same server, it’s easy for them to be targeted by someone who wants to monitor you.
TOR instead uses, at a minimum, three servers to pass your traffic on, each encapsulated with its own layer of encryption. This provides the anonymity that TOR is so famous for. All that these servers see is the IP that sent them the packet, and that’s it. The first server sees your real IP, but not your content or destination. Only the final server knows your true destination, but doesn’t know who you are. In order to trace you, someone trying to spy on you or censor your speech would have to compromise all three servers. And because TOR is a dynamic network that evolves constantly, the path your packets take change all the time.
As you can see, while TOR is not completely foolproof, it is as good as it gets. Even the Government agencies would have very hard time tracking down all TOR users and monitoring their traffic, especially since TOR servers are all over the world.
Getting started
You can download TOR from the project home page(www.torproject.org/), and once installed, you will get a Vidalia icon that allows you to start it. When you do, the software will basically scan the network and establish a secure tunnel between your computer and a random TOR router. It will then open an instance of Firefox that uses this tunnel. Anything you do inside of that browser is anonymized. That means if you go to a website, they will not know who you are unless you tell them in some way. This is great if you want to make casual uses of TOR.
But this software can do far more. For example, you may want to act as a relay yourself. This will allow other people to use your computer to relay traffic. In order to do that, simply go to the Control Panel option inside of Vidalia and set up relaying. The thing to remember here is that by doing that, you are helping out the TOR community. However, you have no way to know what kind of traffic will transit over your system. Some of it may be illegal, and it may expose you to law enforcement actions.
TOR does offer something called hidden services, which are anonymous sites that cannot be tracked. There’s TOR Mail, online stores, forums, and so on. However, for right now, TOR is not anywhere close to a perfect solution. The rumors that TOR can be slow are definitively true. It’s certainly fine for casual web browsing, but little more. This is because few want to run the risk of running a relay. One trick you can do here is to use the option to Use a new identity, which will switch servers and may increase your speed. Finally, even though projects like TOR are very important for people like whistleblowers, activists in oppressed countries, reporters talking to confidential sources, and more, there is still the stigma that TOR is mostly used by those wanting to hide criminal activities.
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