Introduction

Tor (The Onion Router) is a network protocol made by the United States Naval Research Laboratory to encrypt and anonymise your network traffic trough circuits inside a decentralized relay network.

Architecture

You have five types of relays inside Tor:

• 🛡 Guards (used to connect to Tor)
• 🌉 Bridges (get a hidden access to Tor)
• 🧶 Relay nodes (used to make circuits)
• 🚪 Exit nodes (used when you exit Tor)
• 🗃 HSDirs (Hidden Services Directories used to contact a hidden service)

Hidden-services (.onion)

Connections to hidden-services are fully end-to-end encrypted (the base32 is the public-key) inside Tor, first we ask to a HSDir if the hidden-service is alive

• 🙋‍♂️↔🛡↔🧶↔🧶↔🗃

Then the connection to the hidden-service looks like this

• 🙋‍♂️ ↔🛡↔🧶↔🧶↔🧶↔🧶↔🧶↔🧶↔🛡↔🖥

Connection to the Internet

Tor gives the possibility to reach the internet trough his exit nodes network. The exit node haves the traffic unencrypted, if you don’t use HTTPs (for example) it also know where goes the traffic, it look likes this:

• 🙋‍♂️↔🛡↔🧶↔🚪↔ (website/server)

How can you use Tor ?

• Using the official browser (it’s like using firefox but with Tor) TorBrowser
• Using a tunneling solution like a VPN with:
• • Orbot / Invizible (Android)
• • Torsocks / Anonsurf (Linux)
• • OnionFruit (Windows)
• With a dedicated operating system like TailsOS, Whonix, Qubes
• By setting up a SOCKS5 Proxy on your application