'tor' is an implementation of The Onion Routing system, as described in a bit more detail at http://www.onion-router.net/. You can read list archives, and subscribe to the mailing list, at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/. Is your question in the FAQ? Should it be? ************************************************************************** See the INSTALL file for a quickstart. This is all you will probably need. ************************************************************************** ************************************************************************** You only need to look beyond this point if the quickstart in the INSTALL doesn't work for you. ************************************************************************** Dependencies: For tor itself, you're going to need openssl (0.9.5 or later -- including the dev stuff and includes). If you're on Linux, everything will probably work fine. OS X and BSD (but see below under troubleshooting) may work too. Let us know if you get it working elsewhere. If you got the source from cvs: Run "./autogen.sh", which will run the various auto* programs and then run ./configure for you. From there, start at step 3 in the quickstart list above. If the quickstart doesn't work for you: If you have problems finding libraries, try CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" \ ./configure rather than simply ./configure. Check out the list archives at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/ and see if somebody else has reported your problem. If not, please subscribe and let us know what you did to fix it, or give us the details and we'll see what we can do. Do you want to run a tor server? First, set up a config file for your node (start with sample-orrc and edit the top portion). Then run the node (as above, but with the new config file) to generate keys. One of the generated files is your 'fingerprint' file. Mail it to arma@mit.edu. Remember that you won't be able to authenticate to the other tor nodes until I've added you to the directory. Command-line web browsing: For more convenient command-line use, I recommend making a ~/.wgetrc with the line http_proxy=http://localhost:8118 Then you can do things like "wget seul.org" and watch as it downloads from the onion routing network. For fun, you can wget a very large file (a megabyte or more), and then ^z the wget a little bit in. The onion routers will continue talking for a while, queueing around 500k in the kernel-level buffers. When the kernel buffers are full, and the outbuf for the AP connection also fills, the internal congestion control will kick in and the exit connection will stop reading from the webserver. The circuit will wait until you fg the wget -- and other circuits will work just fine throughout. Then try ^z'ing the onion routers, and watch how well it recovers. Then try ^z'ing several of them at once. :) How to use it for ssh: Download tsocks (tsocks.sourceforge.net) and configure it to talk to localhost:9050 as a socks4 server. My /etc/tsocks.conf simply has: server_port = 9050 server = 127.0.0.1 (I had to "cd /usr/lib; ln -s /lib/libtsocks.so" to get the tsocks library working after install, since my libpath didn't include /lib.) Then you can do "tsocks ssh arma@moria.mit.edu". But note that since ssh is suid root, you either need to do this as root, or cp a local version of ssh that isn't suid.