Similar to how Tor relays your traffic through numerous nodes, it can function the other way around with a special web address to hide servers. For uninterrupted services in such places, platforms like Twitter and Facebook offer Tor-friendly versions of their websites. Tor is particularly active in censorship-hit countries, such as, most recently, Russia, where the government tends to regularly block access to sites. Tor isn’t a silver bullet to gaining anonymity as there are a few downsides, which we’ll get to later, but it significantly cuts down the risk and makes tracking your online traffic a nightmare. Not only is your connection secured several more times than it usually is, Tor eliminates the threat of man-in-the-middle attacks because hacking into just one of its links will prove futile as no relay has the complete picture.

The final exit node decrypts the packet and passes it on to the destination without ever knowing who initiated the sequence in the first place. The next will only have information on the first and third relays. The first one will know the origin and the address to the second node. More importantly, all of them run on a need-to-know basis. Instead, it bounces off your request via at least three randomly chosen relays before delivering to the destination, and it does the same again on the way back to you.Įach relay encrypts and forwards your request to the next.

When you browse the web with Tor enabled, your computer doesn’t directly connect to the server.

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