| 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287288289290291292293294295296297298299300301302303304305306307308309310311312313314315316317318319320321322323324325326327328329330331332333334335336337338339340341342343344345346347348349350351352353354355356357358359360361362363364365366367368369370371372373374375376377378379380381382383384385386387388389390391392 | <html><head><title>Tor Documentation</title><meta name="Author" content="Roger Dingledine"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="tor-doc.css"></head><body><h1><a href="http://tor.eff.org/">Tor</a> documentation</h1><p>Tor provides a distributed network of servers ("onion routers"). Usersbounce their communications (web requests, IM, IRC, SSH, etc.) aroundthe routers. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even theonion routers themselves to track the source of the stream.</p><a name="why"></a><h2>Why should I use Tor?</h2><p>Individuals need Tor for privacy:<ul><li>Privacy in web browsing -- both from the remote website (so it can'ttrack and sell your behavior), and similarly from your local ISP.<li>Safety in web browsing: if your local government doesn't approveof its citizens visiting certain websites, they may monitor the sitesand put readers on a list of suspicious persons.<li>Circumvention of local censorship: connect to resources (newssites, instant messaging, etc) that are restricted from yourISP/school/company/government.<li>Socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums forrape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.</ul><p>Journalists and NGOs need Tor for safety:<ul><li>Allowing dissidents and whistleblowers to communicate more safely.<li>Censorship-resistant publication, such as making available yourhome-made movie anonymously via a Tor <a href="#hidden-service">hiddenservice</a>; and reading, e.g. of news sites not permitted in somecountries.<li>Allowing your workers to check back with your home website whilethey're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby thatthey're working with your organization.</ul><p>Companies need Tor for business security:<ul><li>Competitive analysis: browse the competition's website safely.<li>Protecting collaborations of sensitive business units or partners.<li>Protecting procurement suppliers or patterns.<li>Putting the "P" back in "VPN": traditional VPNs reveal the exactamount and frequency of communication. Which locations have employeesworking late? Which locations have employees consulting job-huntingwebsites? Which research groups are communicating with your company'spatent lawyers?</ul><p>Governments need Tor for traffic-analysis-resistant communication:<ul><li>Open source intelligence gathering (hiding individual analysts isnot enough -- the organization itself may be sensitive).<li>Defense in depth on open <em>and classified</em> networks -- networkswith a million users (even if they're all cleared) can't be made safe justby hardening them to external threat.<li>Dynamic and semi-trusted international coalitions: the network canbe shared without revealing the existence or amount of communicationbetween all parties.<li>Networks partially under known hostile control: to blockcommunications, the enemy must take down the whole network.<li>Politically sensitive negotiations.<li>Road warriors.<li>Protecting procurement patterns.<li>Anonymous tips.</ul><p>Law enforcement needs Tor for safety:<ul><li>Allowing anonymous tips or crime reporting<li>Allowing agents to observe websites without notifying them thatthey're being observed (or, more broadly, without having it be anofficial visit from law enforcement).<li>Surveillance and honeypots (sting operations)</ul><p>Does the idea of sharing the Tor network withall of these groups bother you? It shouldn't -- <ahref="http://freehaven.net/doc/fc03/econymics.pdf">you need them foryour security</a>.</p><a name="client-or-server"></a><h2>Should I run a client or a server?</h2><p>You can run Tor in either client mode or server mode. By default,everybody is a <i>client</i>. This means you don't relay traffic foranybody but yourself.</p><p>If your computer doesn't have a routable IP address or you're usinga modem, you should stay a client. Otherwise, please consider beinga server, to help out the network. (Currently each server uses 20-500gigabytes of traffic per month, depending on its capacity and its ratelimiting configuration.)</p><p>Note that you can be a server without allowing users to makeconnections from your computer to the outside world. This is called beinga middleman server.</p><p> Benefits of running a server include:<ul><li>You may get stronger anonymity, since your destination can't knowwhether connections relayed through your computer originated at yourcomputer or not.<li>You can also get stronger anonymity by configuring your Tor clientsto use your Tor server for entry or for exit.<li>You're helping the Tor staff with development and scalability testing.<li>You're helping your fellow Internet users by providing a largernetwork. Also, having servers in many different pieces of the Internetgives users more robustness against curious telcos and brute forceattacks.</ul><p>Other things to note:<ul><li>Tor has built-in support for rate limiting; see BandwidthRateand BandwidthBurst config options. Further, if you havelots of capacity but don't want to spend that many bytes permonth, check out the Accounting and Hibernation features. See <ahref="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ">the FAQ</a>for details.</li><li>It's fine if the server goes offline sometimes. The directoriesnotice this quickly and stop advertising the server. Just try to makesure it's not too often, since connections using the server when itdisconnects will break.</li><li>We can handle servers with dynamic IPs just fine, as long as theserver itself knows its IP. If your server is behind a NAT and it doesn'tknow its public IP (e.g. it has an IP of 192.168.x.y), then we can't use itas a server yet. (If you want to port forward and set your Addressconfig option to use dyndns DNS voodoo to get around this, feel free. Ifyou write a howto, <a href="mailto:tor-volunteer@freehaven.net">evenbetter</a>.)</li><li>Your server will passively estimate and advertise its recentbandwidth capacity.Clients choose paths weighted by this capacity, so high-bandwidthservers will attract more paths than low-bandwidth ones. That's whyhaving even low-bandwidth servers is useful too.</li></ul></p><p>You can read more about setting up Tor as aserver <a href="#server">below</a>.</p><a name="installing"></a><h2>Installing Tor</h2><p>Win32 users can use our Tor installer. See <ahref="tor-doc-win32.html">these instructions</a> for help withinstalling, configuring, and using Tor on Win32.</p><p>You can get the latest releases <ahref="http://tor.eff.org/dist/">here</a>.</p><p>If you got Tor from a tarball, unpack it: <tt>tar xzftor-0.0.9.1.tar.gz; cd tor-0.0.9.1</tt>. Run <tt>./configure</tt>, then<tt>make</tt>, and then <tt>make install</tt> (as root if necessary). Thenyou can launch tor from the command-line by running <tt>tor</tt>.Otherwise, if you got it prepackaged (e.g. in the <ahref="http://packages.debian.org/tor">Debian package</a> or <ahref="http://packages.gentoo.org/packages/?category=net-misc;name=tor">Gentoopackage</a>), these steps are already done for you, and you mayeven already have Tor started in the background (logging to/var/log/something).</p><p>In any case, see the <a href="#client">next section</a> for what to<i>do</i> with it now that you've got it running.</p><a name="client"></a><h2>Configuring a client</h2><p>Tor comes configured as a client by default. It uses a built-indefault configuration file, and most people won't need to change any ofthe settings.</p><p>After installing Tor, you should install <ahref="http://www.privoxy.org/">privoxy</a>, which is a filtering webproxy that integrates well with Tor. Add the line <br><tt>forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .</tt><br>(don't forget the dot) to privoxy's config file (you can just add it to thetop). Then change your browser to http proxy at localhost port 8118.(In Mozilla, this is in Edit|Preferences|Advanced|Proxies.)You should also set your SSL proxy to the samething, to hide your SSL traffic. Using privoxy is <b>necessary</b> because<a href="http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/CLIENTS">Mozilla leaks yourDNS requests when it uses a SOCKS proxy directly</a>. Privoxy also givesyou good html scrubbing.</p><p>To test if it's working, go to <ahref="http://peertech.org/privacy-knoppix/">this site</a> and seewhat IP it says you're coming from. (If it's down, you can try the<a href="http://www.junkbusters.com/cgi-bin/privacy">junkbusters</a>site instead.)</p><p>If you have a personal firewall that limits your computer's abilityto connect to itself, be sure to allow connections from your localapplications tolocal port 8118 and port 9050. If your firewall blocks outgoing connections,punch a hole so it can connect to at least TCP ports 80, 443, and 9001-9033.<!--If you'reusing Safari as your browser, keep in mind that OS X before 10.3 claimsto support SOCKS but does not. -->For more troubleshooting suggestions, see <ahref="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ">the FAQ</a>.</p><p>To Torify an application that supports http, just point it at Privoxy(that is, localhost port 8118). To use SOCKS directly (for example, forinstant messaging, Jabber, IRC, etc), point your application directly atTor (localhost port 9050). For applications that support neither SOCKSnor http, you should look atusing <a href="http://tsocks.sourceforge.net/">tsocks</a>to dynamically replace the system calls in your program toroute through Tor. If you want to use SOCKS 4A, consider using <ahref="http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/">socat</a> (specific instructionsare on <a href="http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/SocatHelp">this hiddenservice url</a>).</p><p>(Windows doesn't have tsocks; see the bottom of the<a href="tor-doc-win32.html">Win32 instructions</a> for alternatives.)</p><a name="server"></a><h2>Configuring a server</h2><p>We're looking for people with reasonably reliable Internet connections,that have at least 20 kilobytes/s each way. If you frequently have alot of packet loss or really high latency, we can't handle your serveryet. Otherwise, please help out!</p><p>To read more about whether you should be a server, check out <ahref="#client-or-server">the section above</a>.</p><p>To set up a Tor server, do the following steps after installing Tor.(These instructions are Unix-centric; but Tor 0.0.9.2 is running as aserver on Windows now as well.)</p><ul><li>1. Edit the bottom part of your torrc (if you installed from source,you will need to copy torrc.sample to torrc first. Look for them in/usr/local/etc/tor/ on Unix). Create the DataDirectory if necessary, and makesure it's owned by the user that will be running tor. Fix your systemclock so it's not too far off. Make sure name resolution works.<li>2. If you are using a firewall, open a hole in your firewall soincoming connections can reach the ports you configured (i.e. ORPort,plus DirPort if you enabled it). Make sure you allow outgoing connections,to get to other onion routers plus any other addresses or ports yourexit policy allows.<li>3. Start your server: if you installed from source you can justrun <tt>tor</tt>, whereas packages typically launch Tor from theirinitscripts or startup scripts. If it logs any warnings, address them. (Bydefault Tor logs to stdout, but some packages log to /var/log/tor/instead. You can edit your torrc to configure log locations.)<li>4. <b>Register your server.</b>  Send mail to <ahref="mailto:tor-ops@freehaven.net">tor-ops@freehaven.net</a> with thefollowing information:<ul><li>The fingerprint for your server's key (the contents of the"fingerprint" file in your DataDirectory -- look in /usr/local/var/lib/toror /var/lib/tor on many platforms)</li><li>Who you are, so we know whom to contact if a problem arises,and</li><li>What kind of connectivity the new server will have.</li></ul>If possible, sign your mail using PGP.</ul><p>Optionally, we recommend the following steps as well:</p><ul><li>(Unix only) 5. Make a separate user to run the server. If youinstalled the deb or the rpm, this is already done. Otherwise,you can do it by hand. (The Tor server doesn't need to be run asroot, so it's good practice to not run it as root. Running as a'tor' user avoids issues with identd and other services thatdetect user name. If you're the paranoid sort, feel free to <ahref="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorInChroot">put Torinto a chroot jail</a>.)<li>6. Decide what exit policy you want. By default your server allowsaccess to many popular services, but we restrict some (such as port 25)due to abuse potential. You might want an exit policy that isless restrictive or more restrictive; edit your torrc appropriately.If you choose a particularly open exit policy, you might want to makesure your upstream or ISP is ok with that choice.<li>7. If you installed from source, you may find the initscripts incontrib/tor.sh or contrib/torctl useful if you want to set up Tor tostart at boot.<li>8. Consider setting your hostname to 'anonymous' or'proxy' or 'tor-proxy' if you can, so when other people see the addressin their web logs or whatever, they will more quickly understand what'sgoing on.<li>9. If you're not running anything else on port 80 or port 443,please consider setting up port-forwarding and advertising theselow-numbered ports as your Tor server. This will help allow users behindparticularly restrictive firewalls to access the Tor network. Win32servers can simply set their ORPort and DirPort directly. Other serversneed to rig some sort of port forwarding; see <ahref="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ServerForFirewalledClients">theFAQ</a> for details of how to set this up.</ul><p>You can click <a href="http://moria.seul.org:9031/">here</a> or <ahref="http://62.116.124.106:9030/">here</a> and look at the router-statusline to see if your server is part of the network. It will be listed bynickname once we have added your server to the list of known servers;otherwise it is listed only by its fingerprint.</p><a name="hidden-service"></a><h2>Configuring a hidden service</h2><p>Tor allows clients and servers to offer <em>hidden services</em>. Thatis, you can offer an apache, sshd, etc, without revealing your IP to itsusers. This works via Tor's rendezvous point design: both sides builda Tor circuit out, and they meet in the middle.</p><p>If you're using Tor and <a href="http://www.privoxy.org/">Privoxy</a>,you can <a href="http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/">go to the hidden wiki</a>to see hidden services in action.</p><p>To set up a hidden service, copy torrc.sample to torrc (by default it'sin /usr/local/etc/tor/), and edit the middle part. Then run Tor. It willcreate each HiddenServiceDir you have configured, and it will create a'hostname' file which specifies the url (xyz.onion) for that service. Youcan tell people the url, and they can connect to it via their Tor client,assuming they're using a proxy (such as Privoxy) that speaks SOCKS 4A.</p><a name="own-network"></a><h2>Setting up your own network</h2><p>If you want to experiment locally with your own network, or you're cutoff from the Internet and want to be able to mess with Tor still, thenyou may want to set up your own separate Tor network.<p>To set up your own Tor network, you need to run your own directoryservers, and you need to configure each client and server so it knowsabout your directory servers rather than the default ones.<ul><li>1: Grab the latest release. Use at least 0.0.9.<li>2: For each directory server you want,<ul><li>2a: Set it up as a server (see <a href="#server">"setting up aserver"</a> above), with a least ORPort, DirPort, DataDirectory, and Nicknamedefined. Set "AuthoritativeDirectory 1".<li>2b: Set "RecommendedVersions" to a comma-separated list of acceptableversions of the code for clients and servers to be running.<li>2c: Run it: <tt>tor --list-fingerprint</tt> if your torrc is inthe default place, or <tt>tor -f torrc --list-fingerprint</tt> tospecify one. This will generate your keys and output a fingerprintline.</ul><li>3: Now you need to teach clients and servers to use the newdirservers. For each fingerprint, add a line like<br><tt>DirServer 18.244.0.114:80 719B E45D E224 B607 C537 07D0 E214 3E2D 423E 74CF</tt><br>to the torrc of each client and server who will be using your network.<li>4: Create a file called approved-routers in the DataDirectoryof each directory server. Collect the 'fingerprint' lines fromeach server (including directory servers), and include them (one perline) in each approved-routers file. You can hup the tor process foreach directory server to reload the approved-routers file (so you don'thave to restart the process).</ul><!--<h2>Other doc resources</h2><ul><li>Design paper<li>Spec and rend-spec<li>others</ul> --></body></html>
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