The most common use of Tor is the Tor Browser Bundle for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which is easy to install and use. Innovation is often driven by competition and adversity, after all. It seems clear that Tor isn’t positive that a compromise has occurred, and in fact take the stance that this is a fact of life it’s what makes security better. The breach of Tor that will be revealed at Hackers to Hackers wasn’t released with much in the way of real information The blog at has a written response to the incident and is worth a read to try and separate sensationalism from fact. It’s also an important point that Tor alone isn’t enough to protect your online browsing habits. If an attacker can see the traffic leaving your computer and also the traffic arriving where you want to go, an end-to-end timing attack can occur with a statistical analysis used to figure out how likely it is for that traffic to be you. This doesn’t make you completely safe on the internet, however. You can picture the internet as a giant cloud (as everyone likes to do) Tor is an encrypted cloud that resides inside the bigger internet cloud that you can’t see into, or even very far if you happen to be in it.
Anyone watching your connection will see only encrypted traffic, and anyone watching the site you’re going to will see random traffic coming from some random spot on the internet. The return packet hops back into the Tor network and repeats the steps in reverse, bouncing around inside and then returning via your encrypted connection. All requests you make through the network are bounced around inside for a while, and then exit the network at a random point and hit your destination.
What basically happens is that you connect to the Tor network via an encrypted connection. That way compromised nodes can’t be used to monitor traffic. Traffic on the internet is a series of hops from router to router and network to network, and in Tor each network node has only the name of the relay it was handed the information from and the relay it handed the information to - so a full path of the traffic destination is never known. Tor, in case you don’t keep up with internet security and obscurity, is a network of nodes that randomize your path through the internet, making it harder to track what sites and services you use.
On October 29-30 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Hackers to Hackers Conference will occur, and one of its presentations will be about how the Tor anonymizing network was compromised by French researchers. This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.
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