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Hide Yourself On The Internet With “The Onion Router” - TOR

Monday, July 4, 2011

Onion Proxy Server allows users of the Tor network to make anonymous outgoing connections via TCP. The key advantage that Tor has over other anonymity networks is its application independence and that it works at the TCP stream level. Tor is truly an amazing advance in anonymous communications across the Internet.

If you want to use all the service, you first need to install the Tor Client, Vidalia (GUI for TOR) and Privoxy (a web filtering proxy) to ensure anonymity.

Step 1: Go to https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en to download a complete bundle of all of this software. One of the components installed by Vidalia is the Torbutton, a quick and easy way to enable and disable surfing via Tor network (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torbutton/). In my case, I’m using Ubuntu 10.4. So the process of installation is somehow different.

# sudo sh -c ‘echo "deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org lucid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list’

# gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv 886DDD89

# gpg –export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512E
E8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -

Start to install TOR

# sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install vidalia privoxy tor

Add the following line in the end of /etc/privoxy/config

forward-socks5 / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

Step 2: After some quick configuration, the Tor proxy is installed and listening on local port 9050, Privoxy is installed and listening on port 8118, and the Torbuton Firefox extension is installed and ready to go in the bottom-right corner of Firefox browser.