Tor Browser and Onion Routing
What Is Tor and Why Should I Use It?
Tor is one of the easiest ways to browse the web anonymously.
How Tor works
Tor is short for The Onion Router (thus the logo) and was initially a worldwide network of servers developed with the U.S. Navy that enabled people to browse the internet anonymously. Now, it’s a non-profit organization whose main purpose is the research and development of online privacy tools.
The Tor network disguises your identity by encrypting your traffic and moving it across different Tor relays within the network.
All you have to do to access Tor is download the Tor browser. Launch it, and everything you do in the browser will go through the Tor network. Most people won’t need to adjust any settings; it just works. That said, since your data is going to hop through a lot of relays, your experience on Tor might be more sluggish than your normal internet browsing.
What Tor is good for?
Tor is useful for anyone who wants to keep their internet activities out of the hands of advertisers, ISPs, and websites. That includes people getting around censorship restrictions in their country, people looking to hide their IP address, or anyone else who doesn’t want their browsing habits linked to them.
The Tor network can also host websites that are only accessible by other Tor users. In other words, you’ve now entered the world of the Dark Web, or sites that aren’t indexed by the regular crawlers you use to search for cute animals, things to buy, and trivia answers. You can find everything from free textbooks to drugs on the Dark Web — and worse — so long as you know the special URL that takes you to these sites. Tread carefully.
What Tor doesn’t do?
Tor sounds perfect on paper — a free, easy system you can use to live a clandestine life online. But it’s far from that. There are plenty of ways to give up your security and anonymity if you’re using Tor.
While Tor might help conceal that it was your computer that made an initial request to, say, visit some sketchy internet forum and do all sorts of horrible things, it’s not going to do anything to help you out if you make an account on that website. And if that account is ever associated with illegal activities, payments, and/or real-world addresses, it doesn’t really matter what browser or anonymizing technique you use to visit the site. You won’t be very hidden after all.
That’s not all. Many of the ways you’d use a normal web browser could also cough up your identity on Tor — or, at least, leave enough breadcrumbs for a dedicated entity to more easily figure out who you are.
Tor Browser will block browser plugins such as Flash, RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others: they can be manipulated into revealing your IP address. Similarly, we do not recommend installing additional addons or plugins into Tor Browser, as these may bypass Tor or otherwise harm your anonymity and privacy.
Additionally:
Tor Browser will warn you before automatically opening documents that are handled by external applications. DO NOT IGNORE THIS WARNING. You should be very careful when downloading documents via Tor (especially DOC and PDF files, unless you use the PDF viewer that’s built into Tor Browser) as these documents can contain Internet resources that will be downloaded outside of Tor by the application that opens them. This will reveal your non-Tor IP address. If you must work with files downloaded via Tor, we strongly recommend either using a disconnected computer, or using dangerzone to create safe PDF files that you can open. Under no circumstances is it safe to use BitTorrent and Tor together, however.
Onion Routing
Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to layers of an onion.
There is a large set of precautionary measures and best practices to make web browsing safer and more secure for users. Let’s say that you send an HTTPS request to a server and someone intercepts that request but that person can’t know what that message says because it’s encrypted. But you are still not satisfied with this level of security and want to take this to the next level i.e. you don’t even want anyone sniffing on your network to know which server you are contacting and if you are making any requests or not. This is where onion routing comes in.
The Onion Routing program consists of studies that investigate, design, construct and analyze anonymous communication networks. The focus is on realistic solutions for low-latency Internet-based connections that can withstand traffic analysis, eavesdropping, and other attacks from both outsiders (such as Internet routers) and insiders (such as hackers) (Onion Routing servers themselves). Onion Routing hides who is communicating with whom from the transport medium; the network just knows that communication is taking place. Furthermore, until the transmission leaves the OR network, the content of the conversation remains hidden from eavesdroppers.
