Skip to main content

Using Tor - from a developer's point of view

People use Tor for various reasons these days. Journalists use them to accept whisleblower submissions, people with restricted internet access use it to jump those blockades, people with concerns about their privacy use it, people with bad intensions use it for obvious reasons etc. Tor has around 2 million users per month and today, in this post, I want to tell you how I, as a (student) developer, use Tor.

There is an awesome feature in Tor called Hidden Services where Tor provides anonymity to the servers hosting a website. Tor provides you with an .onion address (just like .com or .in domain) after the Hidden Service is set up. Tor Hidden Services can also function behind a Firewall or NAT which means, if you have a website running on localhost of your machine, then you can start a Hidden Service and serve the same website on Tor and anybody on Tor can visit it even if your machine is behind a NAT and has a private IP address. I wanted to expose the website running on my local network to the external internet and didn’t wanted to use services like ngrok or online hosting like 000webhost. I took advantage of Hidden Service feature by hosting my project (website) on Tor and shared the .onion address with a few friends to test it out. Of course, in order to access my Hidden Service, my friends had to open the onion address in a Tor Browser. Tor Hidden Service gives anyone the power to host their own websites for free and make them accessible worldwide instantly!

I also wanted to embed Tor into Android apps so that they can connect to my Hidden Service. After struggling for a few days to find suitable libraries, I finally succeeded in finding one (I have forked it to my account. You can take a look at it here). You can create truly decentralized apps if you start a Hidden Service from your app (so that it acts as a server and a client at the same time) and make other instances of your app communicate using each others’ .onion addresses. Here is one desktop app that does it.

There are endless possiblities of what you can do with Tor as a developer. But, you may say that it is very complicated to setup a Hidden Service. Well, it was. I was able to setup my Hidden Service within minutes using Docker. For example, if you already have Docker and Docker-Compose installed on your (Linux) system, then just create a docker-compose.yml file in any directory and put the following into it:

Now, just open the terminal in that directory and run docker-compose up. You will have a complete ready-to-use LAMP stack and you will get a Tor Hidden Service link (.onion address) printed in your terminal as well. It cannot get more easier than that! Let me know your thoughts on this.

Thanks for reading.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Privacy Concerns in Android

Introduction       Android has a robust Access control system. If an Android app needs to use resources or information outside of its own scope, the app has to request the appropriate permission . It needs to get permissions before accessing critical resources like Camera, Location, Contacts etc. On Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher, the app needs to request these permissions at runtime by showing a dialog box to the user. Also, the user will have an option to revoke these permissions for that app at any time in future.       But, in this article, I would like to point out a few resources that an app can access without any permission s and this might raise a serious privacy concern for the user. Privacy Concerns An app can fetch a list of all other apps installed on your phone. An app doesn't need to request any permissions from you to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone. For example, a Netflix app can get to know wh...
Post a Comment
Read more

How are Bitcoins mined?

The image below is an example of the screen that appears when your Bitcoins have been sent. There is some text in roughly red marked area in that image saying “0.00022368 BTC" as a transaction fee to miners. In order to understand how Bitcoins are mined and why you should pay that transaction fee to miners, read this whole article! Whenever you start your transaction, there will be a transaction request (i.e. digitally signed message which is carrying your bitcoins) created and it is sent to the miners. Now, I have created a scenario in order to explain the mining process! The words in bold text will have a special significance and will help us to corelate with the actual Bitcoin terminologies later on. Imagine your transaction request as a letter ( or a courier). Miners collect your letter and put them in a machine . Just like yours’, there might be thousands of such letters from people all around the world! They collect all these and put them in the same mach...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Android Notes - 1

This will be a series of tutorials on basics of Android app development. Although I won’t get too much deep into the practicalities of Android app developement (you have YouTube tutorials for that), but I will try to focus more on the concepts involved. So, let’s begin! Project Structure This is the project structure of a sample app called “Netphlix”. In your Android Studio, it will be displayed on the left sidebar of the window. manifest : You can see a file called AndroidManifest.xml in a directory (folder) called manifests . This AndroidManifest.xml file holds all the necessary information about the app. Information like: what permissions your app requires to run (like Internet permission, permission to access local disk, permission to access the camera etc.), what all components your app has, name of the app, path to the app’s icon image etc. java : Next, you can see a directory named java . This is where all the Java files that you write for you...
Post a Comment
Read more