Notes on TOR

• The Onion Router:
• The Tor browser:

§The Onion Router:

According to the OpenBSD’s pkg_info(1), Tor is a connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system that protects TCP streams: web browsing, instant messaging, irc, ssh, etc.

You can install it via homebrew on macOS and other UNIX:

$ brew install tor

And with pkg_add(1) on OpenBSD:

# pkg_add tor

The Onion Router runs as a service that you need to start before using it, on macOS via homebrew:

$ brew services start tor

and on OpenBSD you enable it to start automatically at boot and start it:

# rcctl enable tor 
# rcctl start tor

Now that we have TOR running, we could try to do something with the default configuration, maybe (or maybe not) from a FreeBSD running on a Virtual Machine or an OpenBSD for higher security 😜

Let’s curl(1) some information anonymously about, say, bitcoin and monero prices on USD and BTC:

$ curl -s --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 "https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=bitcoin,monero&vs_currencies=usd,eur,btc"

even we could pipe it to jq(1), a command-line JSON processor (you need to install it first via pkg_add(1) or homebrew), for better looking:

curl -s --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 "https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=bitcoin,monero&vs_currencies=usd,eur,btc" | jq

§The Tor browser:

The Tor Browser (TB) is a modified version of Mozilla’s Firefox Extended Service Release customized for web browsing over the Tor anonymity network. In addition to obscuring the client’s IP address, TB also mitigates browser fingerprinting attacks and patches the Mozilla code in other ways to prevent privacy leaks.

Tor Browser includes the patched version of Firefox ESR and the NoScript Firefox add-on, a well-known add-on that allows flexible blocking of JS.

You can download it from the official website or with homebrew:

$ brew install --cask tor-browser

On OpenBSD:

# pkg_add tor-browser