There are more than 7000 volunteer nodes in Tor, and even though a number of them are run by intelligence agencies or crooks, the theory is that randomly picking three dodgy nodes at the same time is unlikely, and hitting three co-operating dodgy nodes in one go is less likely still. The first node knows who you are, but not where you are going the third node knows where your traffic is going, but not who you are and the middle node keeps the other two nodes apart. Tor helps wth anonymity, because your traffic is bounced through three randomly-chosen computers on its way to its target, with multiple layers of encryption used (thus the onion metaphor, geddit?) so that each node knows only the previous and next links in the chain. That sort of information may well be pretty harmless, one data point at a time, but to a crook who wants to impersonate you, or to convince your friends he knows you, or to learn more about you to stalk you, it all adds up. You aren’t under any obligation to broadcast your choice of bank to the world, for example, or to give away your favourite TV channel, or to reveal which takeaway pizza business you’re favouring this month. That sort of anonymity isn’t just for activists, journalists and crooks. HTTPS is also important for authenticity, so that when you visit Naked Security, you know that you really are reading our site, rather than content provided by a bunch of imposters.īut anonymity depends on more than that: you might not want an eavesdropper to know that you visited Naked Security at all. Tor, of course, is the so-called onion router network, originally designed by the US Navy as a technique for using the public internet in an anonymous way.Įnd-to-end encryption, such as you get when you point your browser at an HTTPS site like Naked Security, is good for confidentiality: eavesdroppers can’t keep track of which pages you’re most interested in, or sneakily sniff out your email address when you publish a comment. A US judge has put into the public record, during a hearing in Tacoma, Washington, an interesting pair of comments about Tor.

Tor the onion router