What is Tor?

5th September 2025

Could The Onion Router (Tor) add another layer to your cyber security?

Online privacy is becoming more of an issue for users – between websites tracking your movements to better target ads, the UK government’s Online Safety Act requiring identity to access certain sites and the ever-increasing threat of cyber crime, it is more important than ever to try and protect your data as well as you can.

Tor – or The Onion Router – could be one method of doing this. It is free, open source software that enables anyone to communicate anonymously over the internet. Tor routes internet traffic through various nodes or relays, encrypting your data multiple times by using a technique called onion routing:

First, traffic passes through the entry node, which knows your IP address, but not your destination. Next, traffic hits the middle node, passing data along without knowing the source or destination. Finally, the exit node decrypts the final layer and sends the data to the destination, but it doesn’t know when the data came from.

In short, each step means that at no point is both the source and destination known, so knowing where the traffic is coming from is impossible. This improves online privacy by hiding your IP address and location, preventing tracking and surveillance.

Additionally, using Tor helps to protect journalists or activists in hostile environments by keeping their anonymity and it allows users to access censored or restricted sites.

This is one of the downsides of Tor, however: it can be used to reach the dark web or conduct illegal activity without detection. Also, traffic leaving the exit node isn’t encrypted unless the site is using HTTPS, and it can be much slower than regular browsing due to the multiple relays.

There are upsides and downsides to using Tor, so it is difficult to say if you should use it. Using a VPN provides many of the same benefits, but with less risk, as data is encrypted throughout the process, but Tor may be useful to those in situations where politically their communications and locations need to remain unknown.

If you would like to learn more about Tor, please contact Interfuture Security.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/9PzusoaXQio