The Sysadmin’s Daily Grind: Tor

SECRET SURFING

Article from Issue 60/2005
Author(s):

Some people don’t mind leaving traces of their IP address wherever they go, others prefer to use a tool like The Onion Router.

The Onion Router (Tor) [1] runs as a Socks 4 proxy and mangles incoming connections through a network of distributed, independent servers, thus removing any traces of the original data packets. The Onion is similar to Java Anonymous Proxy (JAP), a tool that supports anonymous web surfing. Your ex won’t be able to evaluate the IP address of a blog entry to find out who added those unflattering comments about her. The IP address will be that of the last server in the Onion routing chain. I downloaded Tor from [2], which has a collection of ready-made packages for a variety of Linux distributions, BSD derivates, MacOS, and Windows. I decided to build from scratch using the current tarballs, a quick process. I had to install the OpenSSL and Libevent libraries on my machine, but then it was standard procedure: ./configure && make && make install. As I did not specify any preferences for the target directory, the binaries ended up in /usr/local/bin, and a sample configuration file was placed in /usr/local/etc/tor/.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Tor and Privoxy

    Internet users typically reveal their IP addresses, and this lets companies compile a profile of your Internet activities. Tor and Privoxy can help protect your privacy.

  • Socks 5

    Socks is a universal proxy protocol for TCP and UDP that allows internal hosts to securely pass the firewall and authenticates users. This article describes the latest version of the Socks proxy protocol and shows how to implement it.

  • Onion Pi

    Extend protection to all of your Internet traffic with a Raspberry Pi minicomputer set up as a cost-effective external proxy server.

  • Charly's Column

    Leafnode is a Usenet server for small sites where just a few users need access to a large number of groups. The Leafnode server is designed to recover from errors autonomously and needs very little attention.

  • Charly's Column

    Browsers live in continual danger of compromise by a malicious site. An intermediate proxy combined with a virus scanner can help.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News