Tor Anonymous Browsing

About

Tor Anonymous Browsing is free software^[1] which allows users to browse the internet in an anonymous fashion in order to protect online privacy and bypass censorship of the internet using a middle-man encryption method.^[2]Tor is widely known as one of the easiest methods for accessing the deep/dark web as well. The browsing software works by using a network of relays which transports users to routers at a quick speed so the original computer accessing the internet cannot be detected, increasing the difficulty for tracking network usage throughout the web.

The software is maintained by the non-profit organization The Tor Project, which had a budget of about $2 million dollars in 2012. 80% of this amount was provided by US government organizations.^[3]

Origin

Tor began as new routing technology first developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who were concerned with protecting government communications. The alpha version of the TOR software was announced via FreeHaven.net^[4] mailing list on September 20th, 2002, followed by its presentation at the 13th USENIX Security Symposium on August 13th, 2004. Eventually, the software was released for at home use on December 2006 by “The Tor Project”. Tor was originally an acronym for “The Onion Router”, but it is now referred to as simply “Tor”. The “Onion” part of the name referred to the way in which data packets were encrypted before being sent over the web. Each node would unencrypted a part of the packet, making the packet similar to the layers of an onion. The final layer would then reveal the packets destination.

Notability

Silk Road

Tor became widely noted when the Silk Road marketplace started making headlines due to the nature of products offered on the site. The Silk Road could only be accessed via Tor browsing and thus brought attention to the browser itself. Concern over the security of Tor began to take place when the founder of Silk Road, Ross William Ulbricht (a.k.a. DPR), was arrested with the connection of running the marketplace.

NSA Concerns

Concern of the security of Tor users began to take place once it was relieved the NSA had been using a security bug to de-anonymize users of the Firefox web browser who then also used Tor. Documents noting an attack codenamed “Egotistical Giraffe” showed that the NSA was using vulnerable software on computers to monitor Tor traffic on the user’s end.^[5]

External References