TOR - The Onion Network, which defied the mighty NSA

When we travel around the cyber world, we end up leaving behind a lot of footprints. These originate not only from our comments on Facebook or tweets on twitter.  There are a whole lot of ways how websites tend to track us. We may not like it but websites know our exact location, habit, gender and a host of information of our system.

Although these information may be harmless but in the hands of a hacker or a snoopy government, they may cause harm. For these reasons many of us don’t like these information to be leaked out. Anonymity is especially needed by activists to keep their tracks clean from oppressive regimes and to get around censorship.

As there is variety of ways to get information on the netizens, there are also a number of ways to hide ones identity and maintain anonymity.

 The browser settings are mostly ineffective as they merely don’t record the history of web surfing in the own computer, but it does not stop external factors from recording all the digital footsteps.

The VPNs and Proxy servers are also ineffective as most of them store a data, and under a court order or pressure from governments, they does not have any other option but to turn over the data to the law enforcement agencies.

The best way to maintain anonymity is to use a service call TOR, which comes with its own set browser. Research has proved that till now even the mighty NSA is unable to penetrate the TOR network with complete ease.

TOR stands for “The Onion Network”, which is a virtual circuit with onion like layers. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than 7 thousand relays to conceal a user's location or usage from snoopy governments or censorship firewalls. Tor encrypts the original data multiple times. This encrypted data contains destination IP address. Then it is send through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Each relay only decrypts upto a certain layer of encryption only to reveal the next relay in the circuit in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address. As the routing of the communication is bounced through every hop in the Tor circuit, it eliminates any single point at which the communication can be de-anonymized through network surveillance.

There is no direct way to defeat the anonymity of TOR, for this reason a top secret NSA document has revealed that it has been described as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting".