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<title>Tor Documentation</title>
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<h1><a href="http://tor.eff.org/">Tor</a> documentation</h1>
<p>Tor provides a distributed network of servers ("onion routers"). Users
bounce their communications (web requests, IM, IRC, SSH, etc.) around
the routers. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the
onion 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't
track and sell your behavior), and similarly from your local ISP.
<li>Safety in web browsing: if your local government doesn't approve
of its citizens visiting certain websites, they may monitor the sites
and put readers on a list of suspicious persons.
<li>Circumvention of local censorship: connect to resources (news
sites, instant messaging, etc.) that are restricted from your
ISP/school/company/government.
<li>Socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for
rape 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 your
home-made movie anonymously via a Tor <a href="#hidden-service">hidden
service</a>; and reading, e.g. of news sites not permitted in some
countries.
<li>Allowing your workers to check back with your home website while
they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that
they'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 exact
amount and frequency of communication. Which locations have employees
working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting
websites? Which research groups are communicating with your company's
patent lawyers?
</ul>
<p>Governments need Tor for traffic-analysis-resistant communication:
<ul>
<li>Open source intelligence gathering (hiding individual analysts is
not enough -- the organization itself may be sensitive).
<li>Defense in depth on open <em>and classified</em> networks -- networks
with a million users (even if they're all cleared) can't be made safe just
by hardening them to external threat.
<li>Dynamic and semi-trusted international coalitions: the network can
be shared without revealing the existence or amount of communication
between all parties.
<li>Networks partially under known hostile control: to block
communications, 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 that
they're being observed (or, more broadly, without having it be an
official visit from law enforcement).
<li>Surveillance and honeypots (sting operations)
</ul>
<p>Does the idea of sharing the Tor network with
all of these groups bother you? It shouldn't -- <a
href="http://freehaven.net/doc/fc03/econymics.pdf">you need them for
your 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 for
anybody but yourself.</p>
<p>If your computer doesn't have a routable IP address or you're using
a modem, you should stay a client. Otherwise, please consider being
a server, to help out the network. (Currently each server uses 20-500
gigabytes of traffic per month, depending on its capacity and its rate
limiting configuration.)</p>
<p>Note that you can be a server without allowing users to make
connections from your computer to the outside world. This is called being
a middleman server.</p>
<p> Benefits of running a server include:
<ul>
<li>You may get stronger anonymity, since your destination can't know
whether connections relayed through your computer originated at your
computer or not.
<li>You can also get stronger anonymity by configuring your Tor clients
to 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 larger
network. Also, having servers in many different pieces of the Internet
gives users more robustness against curious telcos and brute force
attacks.
</ul>
<p>Other things to note:
<ul>
<li>Tor has built-in support for rate limiting; see BandwidthRate
and BandwidthBurst config options. Further, if you have
lots of capacity but don't want to spend that many bytes per
month, check out the Accounting and Hibernation features. See <a
href="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ">the FAQ</a>
for details.</li>
<li>It's fine if the server goes offline sometimes. The directories
notice this quickly and stop advertising the server. Just try to make
sure it's not too often, since connections using the server when it
disconnects will break.</li>
<li>We can handle servers with dynamic IPs just fine, as long as the
server itself knows its IP. If your server is behind a NAT and it doesn't
know its public IP (e.g. it has an IP of 192.168.x.y), then we can't use it
as a server yet. (If you want to port forward and set your Address
config option to use dyndns DNS voodoo to get around this, feel free. If
you write a howto, <a href="mailto:tor-volunteer@freehaven.net">even
better</a>.)</li>
<li>Your server will passively estimate and advertise its recent
bandwidth capacity.
Clients choose paths weighted by this capacity, so high-bandwidth
servers will attract more paths than low-bandwidth ones. That's why
having even low-bandwidth servers is useful too.</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>You can read more about setting up Tor as a
server <a href="#server">below</a>.</p>
<a name="installing"></a>
<h2>Installing Tor</h2>
<p>We have installers for Windows and Mac OS X 10.3 or later. For help
with installing,
configuring, and using Tor on these operating systems, consult the
<a href="tor-doc-win32.html">Windows instructions</a> or the
<a href="tor-doc-osx.html">Mac OS X instructions</a>.
</p>
<p>You can get the latest releases <a
href="http://tor.eff.org/dist/">here</a>.</p>
<p>If you got Tor from a tarball, unpack it: <tt>tar xzf
tor-0.0.9.9.tar.gz; cd tor-0.0.9.9</tt>. Run <tt>./configure</tt>, then
<tt>make</tt>, and then <tt>make install</tt> (as root if necessary). Then
you can launch tor from the command-line by running <tt>tor</tt>.
Otherwise, if you got it prepackaged (e.g. in the <a
href="http://packages.debian.org/tor">Debian package</a> or <a
href="http://packages.gentoo.org/packages/?category=net-misc;name=tor">Gentoo
package</a>), these steps are already done for you, and you may
even already have Tor started in the background (logging to
/var/log/something).</p>
<p><b>For newer releases</b>: To build Tor version 0.1.0.1-rc or later from
source, you will need Niels Provos's <tt>libevent</tt> library; you can get
the source for the latest version
<a href="http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/">here</a>.</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-in
default configuration file, and most people won't need to change any of
the settings.</p>
<p>
After installing Tor, you should install <a
href="http://www.privoxy.org/">privoxy</a>, which is a filtering web
proxy that integrates well with Tor. (If you installed the Win32 or OS
X package, see those instructions instead.)
To configure privoxy to use 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 the
top). 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 same
thing, to hide your SSL traffic. Using privoxy is <b>necessary</b> because
<a href="http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/CLIENTS">most browsers leak your
DNS requests when they use a SOCKS proxy directly</a>. Privoxy also gives
you good html scrubbing.</p>
<p>To test if it's working, you need to know your normal IP address so you can
verify that the address really changes when running Tor.
If you are using Linux or OS X your local IP address is shown by the <tt>ifconfig</tt>
command. Under Windows go to the Start menu, click Run and enter <tt>cmd</tt>.
At the command prompt, enter <tt>ipconfig</tt>. If you are behind a NAT/Firewall
you can use one of the sites listed below to check which IP you are using.
When that is done, start Tor and Privoxy and visit any of the sites again.
If everything works, your IP address should have changed.
</p>
<p>
<!--<a href="http://peertech.org/privacy-knoppix/">peertech</a>, -->
<a href="http://www.showmyip.com/">showmyip.com</a> and
<a href="http://ipid.shat.net">ipid.shat.net</a>
are sites that show your current IP so you can see
what address and country you're coming from.
</p>
<p>
If you have a personal firewall that limits your computer's ability
to connect to itself, be sure to allow connections from your local
applications to
local 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're
using Safari as your browser, keep in mind that OS X before 10.3 claims
to support SOCKS but does not. -->
For more troubleshooting suggestions, see <a
href="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, for
instant messaging, Jabber, IRC, etc.), point your application directly at
Tor (localhost port 9050). For applications that support neither SOCKS
nor http, you should look at
using <a href="http://tsocks.sourceforge.net/">tsocks</a>
to dynamically replace the system calls in your program to
route through Tor. If you want to use SOCKS 4A, consider using <a
href="http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/">socat</a> (specific instructions
are on <a href="http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/SocatHelp">this hidden
service 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 a
lot of packet loss or really high latency, we can't handle your server
yet. Otherwise, please help out!
</p>
<p>
To read more about whether you should be a server, check out <a
href="#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 0.0.9.5 and later is running
as a server on Windows now as well.)
</p>
<ul>
<li>0. Verify that your clock is set correctly. If possible, synchronize
your clock with public time servers.</li>
<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). If you installed a package, you should look
for torrc:
<ul><li>in <tt>/etc/torrc</tt> or <tt>/etc/tor/torrc</tt> on Unix.</li>
<li>in <tt>/Library/Tor/torrc</tt> on Macintosh OS X.</li>
<li>in <tt>\Application Data\tor\torrc</tt> or in
<tt>\Application Data\</tt><i>username</i><tt>\tor\torrc</tt>
on Windows.</li>
</ul>
Make sure to define at least Nickname and ORPort.
Create the DataDirectory if necessary, and make
sure it's owned by the user that will be running tor.
Make sure name resolution works.
<li>2. If you are using a firewall, open a hole in your firewall so
incoming 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 your
exit policy allows.
<li>3. Start your server: if you installed from source you can just
run <tt>tor</tt>, whereas packages typically launch Tor from their
initscripts or startup scripts. If it logs any warnings, address them. (By
default Tor logs to stdout, but some packages log to <tt>/var/log/tor/</tt>
instead. You can edit your torrc to configure log locations.)
<li>4. <b>Register your server.</b> Send mail to <a
href="mailto:tor-ops@freehaven.net">tor-ops@freehaven.net</a> with the
following 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/tor
or /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.<br />
Registering your server improves the anonymity of the network quite a bit.
If you don't register your server default users will only use you for the
middle hop of their circuits.
If you are running a registered middleman server, clients will be willing to
choose your node as an entry node as well as a middleman.
<li>5. Subscribe to the <a href="http://archives.seul.org/or/announce/">or-announce</a>
mailing list. It is very low volume, and it will keep you informed
of new stable releases. You might also consider subscribing to <a
href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/">or-talk</a> (higher volume),
where new development releases are announced.</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>Here's where Tor puts its files on many common platforms:</p>
<table borderwidth="3 px">
<tr><th></th><th>Unix</th><th>Windows</th><th>Mac OS X</th></tr>
<tr><th>Configuration</th>
<td><tt>/etc/torrc</tt> <br />or <tt>/usr/local/etc/torrc</tt></td>
<td><tt>\Application&nbsp;Data\</tt><i>username</i><tt>\tor\torrc</tt> <br />or
<tt>\Application&nbsp;Data\tor\torrc</tt></td>
<td><tt>/Library/Tor/torrc</tt></td></tr>
<tr><th>Fingerprint</th>
<td><tt>/var/lib/tor/fingerprint</tt>
or <tt>/usr/local/var/lib/tor/fingerprint</tt></td>
<td><tt>\Application&nbsp;Data\</tt><i>username</i><tt>\tor\fingerprint</tt>
or <tt>\Application&nbsp;Data\tor\fingerprint</tt></td>
<td><tt>/Library/Tor/var/lib/tor/fingerprint</tt></td></tr>
<tr><th>Logs</th>
<td><tt>/var/log/tor</tt>
or <tt>/usr/local/var/log/tor</tt></td>
<td><tt>\Application&nbsp;Data\</tt><i>username</i><tt>\tor\log</tt>
or <tt>\Application&nbsp;Data\tor\log</tt></td>
<td><tt>/var/log/tor</tt></td></tr>
</table>
<p>
Optionally, we recommend the following steps as well:
</p>
<ul>
<li>6 (Unix only). Make a separate user to run the server. If you
installed 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 as
root, so it's good practice to not run it as root. Running as a
'tor' user avoids issues with identd and other services that
detect user name. If you're the paranoid sort, feel free to <a
href="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorInChroot">put Tor
into a chroot jail</a>.)
<li>7. Decide what exit policy you want. By default your server allows
access to many popular services, but we restrict some (such as port 25)
due to abuse potential. You might want an exit policy that is
less restrictive or more restrictive; edit your torrc appropriately.
If you choose a particularly open exit policy, you might want to make
sure your upstream or ISP is ok with that choice.
<li>8. If you installed from source, you may find the initscripts in
contrib/tor.sh or contrib/torctl useful if you want to set up Tor to
start at boot.
<li>9. Consider setting your hostname to 'anonymous' or
'proxy' or 'tor-proxy' if you can, so when other people see the address
in their web logs or whatever, they will more quickly understand what's
going on.
<li>10. If you're not running anything else on port 80 or port 443,
please consider setting up port-forwarding and advertising these
low-numbered ports as your Tor server. This will help allow users behind
particularly restrictive firewalls to access the Tor network. Win32
servers can simply set their ORPort and DirPort directly. Other servers
need to rig some sort of port forwarding; see <a
href="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ServerForFirewalledClients">the
FAQ</a> for details of how to set this up.
</ul>
<p>You can click <a href="http://moria.seul.org:9031/">here</a> or <a
href="http://62.116.124.106:9030/">here</a> and look at the router-status
line to see if your server is part of the network. It will be listed by
nickname 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 hidden services. That is,
you can offer a web server, SSH server, etc., without revealing your IP to its
users. You can even have your application listen on localhost only, yet
remote Tor connections can access it. This works via Tor's rendezvous
point design: both sides build a 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's
in /usr/local/etc/tor/), and edit the middle part. Then run Tor. It will
create each HiddenServiceDir you have configured, and it will create a
'hostname' file which specifies the url (xyz.onion) for that service. You
can 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>
<p>Let's consider an example.
Assume you want to set up a hidden service to allow people to access your
Apache web server through Tor. By doing this, they can access your server
but won't know who they are connecting to. You want clients to use the
standard port 80 when accessing your server. However, if your Apache
server is actually running on port 8080 locally, client connections need
to be redirected.</p>
<p><b>HiddenServiceDir</b> is a directory where Tor will store information
about that hidden service. In particular, Tor will create a file here named
<i>hostname</i> which will tell you the onion URL. You don't need to add any
files to this directory.</p>
<p><b>HiddenServicePort</b> is where you specify a virtual port and where
to redirect connections to this virtual port. For instance, you tell
Tor there's a virtual port 80 and then redirect traffic to your local
webserver at 127.0.0.1:8080.</p>
<p>Example lines from a torrc file</p>
<pre>
HiddenServiceDir /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080
</pre>
<p>This tells Tor to store its files in <tt>/usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/</tt>
and allow people to connect to your onion address on port 80. It
will then redirect requests to your localhost webserver on port 8080.
</p>
<p>To let people access your hidden service, look at the file
<tt>/usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/hostname</tt> which will tell you what the
hostname is (such as xyz.onion). Then, as long as they have Tor and Privoxy
configured, they can access your webserver with a web browser by connecting
to http://xyz.onion/</p>
<p>You can have multiple tor hidden services by repeating Dir and Ports:</p>
<pre>
HiddenServiceDir /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080
HiddenServiceDir /usr/local/etc/tor/other_hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 6667 127.0.0.1:6667
HiddenServicePort 22 127.0.0.1:22
</pre>
<p>The above example will allow people to connect to the hostname in
<tt>/usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/hostname</tt> for an HTTP server and
to a different hostname in
<tt>/usr/local/etc/tor/other_hidden_service/hostname</tt> for an IRC and
SSH server. To an end user, this appears to be two separate hosts with
one running an HTTP server and another running an IRC/SSH server.</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 cut
off from the Internet and want to be able to mess with Tor still, then
you may want to set up your own separate Tor network.
<p>
To set up your own Tor network, you need to run your own directory
servers, and you need to configure each client and server so it knows
about your directory servers rather than the default ones.
<ul>
<li>1: Grab the latest release. Use at least 0.0.9.5.
<li>2: For each directory server you want,
<ul>
<li>2a: Set it up as a server (see <a href="#server">"setting up a
server"</a> above), with a least ORPort, DirPort, DataDirectory, and Nickname
defined. Set "AuthoritativeDirectory 1".
<li>2b: Set "RecommendedVersions" to a comma-separated list of acceptable
versions of the code for clients and servers to be running.
<li>2c: Run it: <tt>tor --list-fingerprint</tt> if your torrc is in
the default place, or <tt>tor -f torrc --list-fingerprint</tt> to
specify one. This will generate your keys and output a fingerprint
line.
</ul>
<li>3: Now you need to teach clients and servers to use the new
dirservers. 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 DataDirectory
of each directory server. Collect the 'fingerprint' lines from
each server (including directory servers), and include them (one per
line) in each approved-routers file. You can hup the tor process for
each directory server to reload the approved-routers file (so you don't
have to restart the process).
</ul>
<!--<h2>Other doc resources</h2>
<ul>
<li>Design paper
<li>Spec and rend-spec
<li>others
</ul> -->
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