The Onion Router HOWTO

My quest for freedom and anonymity have take me to the world of similar people who been working around this since decades. One such great concept is TOR – The Onion Router which is quite reliable and provides high anonymity and many more tunneling features. Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features. Here our college network is pretty restricted, where we are not allowed to scan external ports. No freedom to use FTP, no IRC acess, no multimedia streaming and impossible to connect to CVS repositories. I would assure that if you too are in such a bizare sutuation this one is for you.

Tor is a Secound generation Onion Router used for tunneling the data through the third part proxies. Its not any hacking kit you can rely on its service. Its based on good ethics. TOR provies both client and server features. If you wish to contribute your bandwidth for promoting the Onion Routing you can even configure your system to the Tor server. Here I discuss the basic and advanced features of Tor and howto setup it on Ubuntu “Breezy Badger”. Especially for those people who find impossible to connect to CVS to acess their projects at GNU or SAROVAR or whatever It could help you out. Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy. For all those people who like to remain anonymous and stay away from loggers this could be last resort.

Every packet you send in and out have signatures and headers which can help trace you out the location and Identity. So lets see how this tor thing works in protecting your Identity from the remote host. Tor is a distributed anonymous network which routes your data randomly and encryptedthough a list of hosts from the Cleint to the remote host. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you—and then periodically erasing your footprints. This figurews ilustrate how Tor works.
The Alice ’s Tor client connect to the directory server and get the list of Tor nodes and prepates how the routing is to be done . No one ever know the path followed bt the packets inside the Tor network.
The client software sends the pcakets to the Tor nodes encrypted and the data is routed on to many tor nodes and finally reaches the remote system. The path won’t remain constant Its purly random from one remote host to other thus providing maximum anonymity.

To setup tor on Ubuntu you need to follow the following steps on root terminal
Setup the http proxy address, port and authentication details.

root@zionmainframe:~# export http_proxy=”http://user:password@172.16.16.2:3128″

After enabling all the apt-get repositories at /etc/apt/source.list install the tor by executing following comand.

root@zionmainframe:~# apt-get install tor

After the installation tor starts to run on 9050 port on default. Here tor doesn’t have inbuit socks server. Its based on other third party socks server privoxy. In order to get privoxy execute the following comand

root@zionmainframe:~# apt-get install privoxy

Add this line on the to of the config file of privoxy

root@zionmainframe:~# vi /etc/privoxy/config
forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 . (add this line on the top of the config file including the dot its important)

Add following lines on to the tor config file torrc

root@zionmainframe:~# vi /etc/tor/torrc

HttpProxy 172.16.16.2:3128
HttpProxyAuthenticator user:password (whatever your user authetication details)

Restart the services

root@zionmainframe:~# invoke-rc.d tor restart
root@zionmainframe:~# invoke-rc.d privoxy restart

To set your browser to socks proxy set http and ssl proxy to 127.0.0.1 and port 8118.

Contd………………