66
votes
Can anti-virus/virus protection be used to spy on you?
Any software you install on your system can compromise the system and thus affect security and privacy. This can be done either willingly or because of bugs in the software. And this is doubly true ...
- 208k
21
votes
Accepted
What is this potential identity leak that NoScript warns about?
So after some digging into NoScript's settings, I found some settings for something called "Cross-tab identity leak protection". Googling this led to a tor project issue Targeted ...
- 11.6k
21
votes
Is Tor over VPN a security risk?
TOR connection to a VPN OK, VPN connection to TOR go to jail.
This assessment, in general, is not accurate. Though it's true that there's always something that can go wrong with any security system. ...
- 475
17
votes
Stop large requests to my server (TOR)
You could drop packets from tor nodes all together if you like with ip tables.
List of tor nodes can be found at:
Ref 1: https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py
Ref 2: https://www....
- 827
17
votes
Accepted
Does Tor help us to prevent ISP tracking?
You cannot hide how much data you are sending and when you are online. But, Tor encrypts data and sends it through proxies before it reaches the target server, so that hides the contents of the ...
- 33.1k
14
votes
Accepted
Why is the data from a Tor exit node not encrypted?
Encryption of traffic exiting Tor and going to the destination server is based on whether the destination server supports encryption, and whether the destination server was addressed on an encrypted ...
- 73.3k
13
votes
Is it dangerous to use Tor?
It is difficult to say what nationstate intelligence agencies will do with people who use tor, since they don't generally reveal their procedures. However, there are approximately 2 million connected ...
- 9,462
10
votes
Why did the government made Project TOR public?
There are certainly a lot of reasons which we could speculate about, but one is fact and inherent in the way Tor works to provide anonymity to its users:
If the "government" (or rather, the united ...
- 9,293
10
votes
What is Tor and is there anything I can do to stop it?
Using tor has not opened you up to "hackers, spying and very bad stuff," so be aware that is irrelevant. If that is what you are worried about then you need to do nothing.
Tor is a way to preserve ...
- 61.7k
10
votes
Anonymity Stack: Home connection -> VPN -> Whonix(Tor) -> Socks5. Few questions on anonymity
First, some comments
I'll be frank here. A lot of your setup is poorly thought out or outright dangerous. For example, using a proxy after Tor (it's not TOR) can greatly decrease anonymity as you now ...
- 67.3k
10
votes
How does Tor maintain anonymity when a source and destination are required at the end?
The trick is that it's the payload of the packet that's encapsulated, not the whole TCP packet. Therefore, when the packet leaves the tor exit node unencrypted, it is sent with the return address of ...
- 411
8
votes
Accepted
Does the Tor Browser leak a list of visited websites to TLD DNS services?
No, the Tor Browser never resolves hostnames itself. As you recognized, querying DNS servers directly would effectively allow an adversary to deanonymize you (a vulnerability known as DNS leak).
When ...
- 45.1k
8
votes
How precisely can your ISP tell you are using Tor?
Standard Tor traffic
Default Tor entry nodes are publicly listed. So, to block a standard Tor connection, your ISP just needs to check the IPs you're connecting to against a list of known nodes (...
- 45.1k
8
votes
Can VPN or Tor exit nodes modify the webserver's hostname?
An exit node (no matter if Tor or VPN) has full control what data are sent and where they get sent to. This means it can modify the data from client to server, from server to client or send the data ...
- 208k
8
votes
How well can Tor + VPN secure my anonymity on the internet?
No. Just installing Tor and a VPN does not make you safe. Even if Tor was resilient against attack and VPN was secure and trustworthy, they would only mask your IP. Many people using Tor were caught, ...
- 7,858
7
votes
Accepted
How does Tor network handle individual sessions?
Brief overview:
First, you get a circuit of Tor nodes, let's say 1, 2, 3.
Next, you craft an encrypted packet to node 3, encrypt that in a packet to node 2, then encrypt that in a packet to node 1.
...
- 2,358
7
votes
How Anonymous Am I?
It depends on what you are doing. If you're running BitTorrent from your laptop, you aren't anonymous at all, for instance, since it publishes your IP. If you log into your email, or your Facebook, ...
- 572
7
votes
Accepted
Can the real IP address leak using curl via Tor?
--socks5 will use the SOCKS5 protocol for the HTTP connections but the name lookup will still be done using the normal DNS which means that your public IP address can be seen by the external name ...
- 208k
7
votes
Accepted
wget: what security issues am I not considering?
There are several questions in here. You are asking how to avoid detection, how to avoid attribution, and how to avoid exploitation. Though you did elaborate on your goals, I still don't know your ...
- 67.3k
7
votes
Accepted
Can JavaScript break anonimity provided by Tor?
tl;dr: Yes, JavaScript can break anonymity provided by Tor if there's a browser vulnerability involved, if you enable features that weren't designed anonymity in mind (like WebRTC or Geolocation API), ...
- 19.4k
7
votes
Accepted
How does proxychains avoid DNS leaks?
Part of this boils down to how proxychains works in general. In order to proxy traffic from arbitrary programs (that may or may not have proxy support), proxychains uses the LD_PRELOAD environment ...
- 13.2k
7
votes
How does Tor maintain anonymity when a source and destination are required at the end?
How Tor protects anonymity
The anonymity happens because while the Tor exit node knows the final packet and its destination, it doesn't know where the packet originated from. Similarly, the entry ...
- 31.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Can Tor guarantee anonymity when downloading torrents?
Using Tor for torrenting is the way many people got caught.
So what's the fix? There are two answers here.
The first answer is "don't run Bittorrent over Tor". We've been saying for years not ...
6
votes
Stop large requests to my server (TOR)
You can drop packets that contain specific string and apperantely all requests contain: 'HEAD //images/' string.
I suggest the following rule for now and later you can remove it:
iptables -I INPUT -...
- 323
6
votes
Is it dangerous to use Tor?
I don't normally wear a tinfoil hat, and I don't put too much stock in blogs that do.
That being said, Tor's usefulness depends on what your Internet traffic is typically for. Tor's advantages aren'...
- 12.5k
6
votes
Accepted
Tor: Is a Diffie-Hellman key exchange being done over recipient of traffic?
No, the key exchange is done between the client and each relay. This is the general technique behind onion routing. For the modern Tor protocol, the client will exchange a symmetric key (AES128) with ...
- 67.3k
6
votes
Accepted
Why IPv6 showing on whatismyip.com?
As indicated on the IPv6 roadmap of the Tor project, tor has had support for exit nodes contacting destinations over IPv6 since 2.4.8-alpha. The closest stable release I could find that followed is 2....
- 916
6
votes
Accepted
How well can Tor + VPN secure my anonymity on the internet?
This is a long explanation, for a TL:DR, read my first answer here.
What a VPN does is create an encrypted tunnel between you and a VPN server. When you want to send data to a server on the internet (...
- 7,858
5
votes
Why is Tor safer than a proxy?
I know this was already answered, but a lot of important details were left out.
How onion routing works
Onion routing is an anonymity technique where a path is chosen randomly through a cluster of ...
- 67.3k
5
votes
How to increase anonymity of Tor
This actually decreases anonymity. If the final IP address you exit from is fixed, for example a VPN, then you lose a large amount of privacy and anonymity functionality that Tor provides via its ...
- 67.3k
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