How to use Tor

04 Feb 2015


Cybersecurity industry analyst

Tor, short for The Onion Router, was developed in 1996 by the United States Naval Research Laboratory (an organisation first conceived by Thomas Edison as a 'great research laboratory' in 1920). At the time, its primary function was protecting secret government and military communications sent over an unsecured network.

Today, Tor has been fully co-optedby the open-source software community and is used worldwide to help dissidents of totalitarian regimes escape surveillance and censorship.

It's best to think of it not as a piece of software, but as an alternative way to browse the webwith relative anonymity. Torworks by hiding your own internet activity by mixing your data packets with millions of others via an entire network of distributed "Tor" nodes, each acting as another layer of protection and anonymity -- hence the onion analogy. Here's how you can use it. (WIRED provides these instructions on the understanding your intentions are lawful. Using Tor is not a criminal activity in of itself -- it is perfectly legitimate to seek anonymity online -- but don't criminalise yourself by searching for illegal material.)

1. There are several ways to use Tor.
Probably the easiest way to get started is to download the Tor Browser bundle (available for Windows, Mac and Linux). The bundle is based on the popular Firefox browser and is usually installed and configured. It also includes popular privacy-enhancing extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere (which makes sure you use websites' more secure sign-in pages wherever possible, eg when using Facebook, Gmail, etc).

2. Once you download this browser bundle and run it for the first time, it allows you to choose between the simple option of using a direct internet connection, which can automatically connect you to the TOR network, and the more advanced version, which is useful if you are trying to use Tor in a network which might be monitored, censored, proxied or limited in other ways. If you need that option, choose "Configure".

You will have to choose a few settings to get you past those limitations, including setting your Tor browser to use only "allowed" protocols such as 80 (http) and other methods to sneak by ISPs who attempt to block Tor traffic.

3. When you are connected, the browser will display a welcome page from where you can start browsing, or "test your network setting", which will allow you to see your Tor IP address -- ie where your computer seems to be to the rest of the world. In my attempts I've had several different "exit nodes" including Denmark and Luxembourg. Once connected, you can visit the Tor Atlas to see for yourself.

4. Prepare yourself for a somewhat slowed-down internet experience: after all, your website requests are now travelling through an entire network of "onion" routers before returning to your device. How you choose to browse the web from this point on -- is up to you. You can visit them normally -- or you can search the web using the built-in "Startpage", from where you can also view pages by an additional "proxy" called ixquick which will fetch those pages for you.

5. There are other ways to use Tor. If you already have Firefox, you can just get the Tor button as an add-on. "The Guardian Project", a team of developers who build secure mobile applications have created Orbot, which is a Torproxy for android phones. You can also try "Tails", an operating system which you can run on almost any device using a USB thumb drive or an SD memory stick. Tails relies heavily on Tor, but be advised: just like Tor, it is not bulletproof.