Tor Browser 12.0.3
Nate Drake nosedives into the dark net with the Tor Browser and is blown away by its new censorship-resistant features.
IN BRIEF
The Tor Project never fails to impress with its easy-to-set-up private browser, which doesn’t record a web history and hides your IP address. The latest version supports more languages than ever before and offers a selection of bridges to connect to Tor, even in countries where it’s censored.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz
Mem: 512MB
HDD: 500MB
Builds: ARM64, x86_64
Since 2008, the Tor Browser has been making waves in providing online privacy. Successive versions are based on Firefox ESR (in this case version 102.8) and come with a number of features to make you as anonymous online as possible. Since our previous look in LXF263, the Tor Browser has seriously upped its game in terms of protecting your privacy and evading censorship.
Onion 101
The Tor Browser uses so-called onion routing to keep your location and data safe. It works by encapsulating and removing various layers of the encryption, much like peeling an onion.
When the Tor Browser first launches, by default it searches for a list of Tor entry nodes, sometimes known as guard relays, and downloads the public encryption key for one at random. It then establishes an encrypted connection to this entry node.
The data packets sent to the entry node can then be encrypted and forwarded to a second Tor relay, using the second relay’s public key. The second relay has no record of the IP address you used to connect to the original entry node. It doesn’t even have any way to determine that the connection has come from an entry node.