TOR Illustrations created by Ludovic F.R. That’s a lot of words to digest, so let’s try a series of picture. Because the routing of the communication is partly concealed at every hop in the Tor circuit, this method eliminates any single point at which the communicating peers can be determined through network surveillance that relies upon knowing its source and destination. The final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address. Each relay decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal only the next relay in the circuit in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. Tor encrypts the data, including the destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Onion routing is implemented by encryption in the application layer of a communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion. The Tor Wikipedia page describes it like this … If however you wish to be anonymous and hide who you are and where you are, then the Tor network offers a way of doing exactly that. This is what happens when you surf the web, it is how it all works under the covers. When you connect to another computer, another IP destination, your IP address identifies you to that other computer. The name TOR is in fact an acronym that stands for “The Onion Router”.Įvery interconnected computer out there has a unique number called an IP address.

That highlighted bit perhaps catches the eye.

These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious actors. 15% of the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes.

…What we’re seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. When writing about an analysis of the report on the Russian Hacking the other day, the following was mentioned …

What is tor used for