Learning about Tor

In this project, you will learn how to use Tor, a tool and network designed to protect your anonymity online. Tor originally developed from research, sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, on onion routing (Dingledine, Mathewson, and Syverson, 2004). In onion routing, the client builds a circuit of nodes in an overlay network, which is a network built on top of an existing network. The Tor network is an overlay network that runs on the Internet, although it can run on separate networks. The client sends a message to each node, which is specifically encrypted for that node, asking the node to send it to the next node in the circuit. Each node peels back a layer of encryption and forwards the result to the next hop in the circuit, and hence, the onion analogy. The last node contains the client's actual message, which is forwarded to the destination server.

Onion routing provides anonymity because the destination server does not know the IP address of the...