Tor: anonymity online
I’ve been using this service for awhile now and I think it deserves a write-up…
What is Tor you ask? They describe it better on their website so here’s a blurb from there:
“Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.”
Because it has to bounce off multiple relays on the the Internet, browsing is a little slow on it. I use it when I want to browse anonymously, but I don’t use it when I do Internet Banking or log on to any of my other services that require authentication. Why don’t I use it all the time? Well, with Tor, anyone can become a relay host for the network. The way it works is that, although the tunnel between the Tor clients are encrypted, the traffic coming out of the exit hosts are not. So those who want to capture other people’s traffic, all they have to do is setup a relay host on the Tor network and start sniffing the traffic coming out of their exit host that they have set up. They may not know where the traffic is coming from, but they can still capture credentials and other details to your webmail services or anything that sends data in clear text.
It’s still worth checking out if you’re concerned about protecting your anonymity online while web browsing. They have software versions for Windows, MAC OS X and Linux.
