The Onion Routing - highly anonymous

Post date: Jun 28, 2011 3:42:48 AM

We all many times use proxies for staying anonymous on internet.

 Lets quickly check out , what we are actually doing while using proxies. We first connect to a proxy server which brings resources requested by us from the web server.

Thus a proxy server hides our identity  by acting as an intermediary between us and the web server that we are accessing. You might want to read detailed post on proxies here.

Suppose we break into a server using a proxy server thinking that we are anonymous. But what if owner

of web server  starts enquiring about the clients connecting to it using the proxy server  and it is possible that owners of proxy server might   reveal our identity. This means we cant actually rely on proxy servers for being anonymous online. Here comes the concept of THE ONION ROUTING (TOR) into picture. By using this , the client traffic is supposed to be passed from three different servers or nodes before reaching to actual web server. It may randomly take any path through any three nodes. 

Lets consider it has taken path shown by green arrows. Now

* Node 1 knows only actual origin(client) but not actual destinantion(web server).

*Node 5 neither knows actual origin nor actual destinantion.

*Node 9 knows actual destination but not actual origin.

Thus no one exactly knows which client is accessing which web server. So it is highly anonymous.

Installing and Using TOR.

Step 1. Download the TOR client from here and run the setup .

Note: You need to install a Mozilla firefox add on which is included in package you have downloaded to use Tor.

Step 2. Open the 'Vidalia Control Panel' from the task bar and Click on 'Start Tor'.

Step3. Now open Mozilla Firefox browser, single click on red highlighted 'Tor Disabled' on right corner of browser and it will turn to green highlighted 'Tor Enabled'.

Now just log on to 'www.whatismyip.com' and you will see your new public IP address that will keep changing after an interval of time according to the path randomly taken by web traffic through three different nodes