Tor

Tor (abbreviation of The Onion Router) is a distributed proxy system that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance known as traffic analysis.

You should note that tor is not a panacea for internet security, it comes with its own set of dangers. Please follow good browsing practises, such as using encryption for email and https for logging into websites. See this news story for an example of people using tor without understanding these dangers.

This is a quick guide to quickly get tor working on you computer, and should help protect you from casual surveillance. Where your privacy or security is extremely important to you, please follow the official tor documentation instead and do more extreme testing that you are secure. Happy browsing!

Emerging Tor
Emerging tor will emerge as a dependency

Configuring tsocks
Tor comes with a configuration file to setup tsocks. Copy it, and edit it if you need to.

Configuring tor
If you want to use tor for anonymised web browsing, skip this section. The default torrc will be fine.

If you need features advanced such as running or accessing hidden services or running a tor relay, you will need to edit torrc. You should read the official tor documentation for more information.

Start tor
Add tor to the default runlevel if you want it to start on bootup.

Firefox
Addons are not required to use tor, but are highly recommended for easy enabling/disabling.

Without Addons
Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings. Select "Manual proxy configuration" and leave all the fields blank except the SOCKS proxy. Put the settings of your tor configuration here (default is localhost (or 127.0.0.1) at port 9050) that you set in the /etc/socks/tsocks.conf. Make sure to fill out the "Do not use proxy for" box with any sites that you can not risk going over the tor network (banking sites, email, etc.)

Using FoxyProxy
Install FoxyProxy Standard.


 * In Firefox, go to the Tools -> FoxyProxy Standard -> Options
 * Click the 'Add New Proxy' button
 * Under Host or IP Address, enter '127.0.0.1'
 * Under Port, enter '9050'
 * Select 'SOCKS Proxy'
 * Leave the type as 'SOCKSv5'
 * Click back to the 'General' tab
 * Change 'Proxy Name' to 'TOR'
 * Select "Perform Remote DNS Lookups"
 * Click 'OK'
 * When prompted 'You didn't enter any whitelisted...', click 'OK'
 * Right click the FoxyProxy icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window, and select 'Use proxy "TOR" for all URLs'.

Configure Firefox to Protect DNS Lookups
Unfortunately, FoxyProxy has had bugs in the past where DNS Lookups have been directly queried, not through the proxy. For a little more certainty, do the following.


 * Go to url: about:config
 * Set filter to dns
 * Set 'network.proxy.socks_remote_dns' to 'true' (by double clicking)

Check that TOR is working
A simple check is to go to any of the "What is my IP Address" websites, and see if this agrees with your actual external IP address.

Go to this website to check that tor is working. You should bear in mind that if you have not successfully gotten tor working, this will alert observers that you are setting up tor, which may look suspicious. (If you are in an environment where security is essential, do more checks, and follow a better guide!).

Browse Securely
There are many guides out there on how to browse safely. This is quite a good initial guide and quick reference.