The Onion Routing using TOR Bridges.

Internet is an amazing place to be, you can sit at one corner and check out what is happening on another corner. When you are browsing on the internet, we are giving away our information.  This information is then used by censors, government, or many other private organizations like marketers which target their customer base and do business according to their browsing patterns. There is a way around this. Anonymous browsing promises to overcome some of these leakages. Anonymous browsing has its own pros and cons. It has is useful for hiding day-to-day activities from the hackers, government and even marketers. It keeps us away from being tracked. It has somehow turned out to be useful for the criminals to keep their illegal activities at bay from crime police. This place is house of Dark Web.

Using TOR Browser

TOR, The Onion Routing is a free browsing software that enables anonymous communication. TOR was developed by US NAVAL Research Team. Their main was to secure the United States intelligence communication online.

Like an onion has several layers, the TOR network is also protected by one layer (relay) connecting to the other, without informing the third layer (relay). That is how it maintains its anonymity. These relays are Entry or Guard relays, Middle relays and Exit relays.

TOR uses nodes or relays to reach the destination that are spread all over the world. Individuals around the world host these TOR relays (Entry, Middle and Exit) to keep the TOR network running. These relays or nodes are basically willing individuals who wish to keep anonymity running act as the connection in between to to host the entry node, middle node or exit nodes. These nodes or relay list(Tor IPs) can be found easily on the net. As these relays are openly available on the web, many organisation or ISP have blocked them as they do not want TOR to run.

Working model of TOR network, The blue cylindrical tube is the traffic flow.

TOR Bridges.

Relays are distributed all over the world and and hence every major security organization has the list of TOR relay IPs. This list is blocked by many service providers around the globe so as to stop the use dark web.

Bridges on the other hand work as the TOR Relays but are not as widely distributed and are only made available upon request. Bridges can be considered as TOR relays that are not listed on to the TOR directory.

You can use tor bridges very easily, one of the ways is to use the bridges available in the tor browser itself. Unfortunately these bridges are publicly available and hence blocked by the censors.

Another way is to mail to bridges@torproject.org, they will provide you with three bridges. "get bridges" is the text to be used when mailing to above address.

Bridges may look like below :

141.201.27.48:443 4352e58420e68f5e40bf7c74faddccd9d1349413

The first entity is IP address : 141.201.27.48

Second entity is port : 443

Last entity is unique identifier of bridge: 4352e58420e68f5e40bf7c74faddccd9d1349413

Your bridge may also look like this.

obfs3 141.201.27.48:420 4352e58420e68f5e40bf7c74faddccd9d1349413

The first entity "obfs3" is the pluggable(PT) transport element. A PT is used to transform the traffic between the client and the bridge so that traffic and it won't actually look like the TOR traffic and bypasses the sniffing elements.

Enabling TOR Bridges

1. Open your TOR browser, and click on Configure

2. Click on Yes, as our ISP is blocking the TOR.

3. Then we may use the default bridge or the one provided by Tor via mail or website.

This will help you by pass the censorship or blocking of TOR in your network. People remain anonymous for multiple reasons but many of these services are exploited by drug dealers, criminals, thieves and even child pornography. If someone encounters with any kind of molestation or even child pornography, they should take a step forward and blow the whistle on such bad activities.