The Anonymous Network

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Do you think your privacy and sensitive information  is protected while you browse the Internet? You should really read this blog to understand how people in the open internet try to steal data, passwords and other information.

This post talks about "The Anonymous Network" which is a reference to "The Onion Network". You might have heard about “The Onion Router” which is abbreviated as “Tor”. At present we can safely say that Tor provides complete anonymity and data security for some level in the internet. So how does this Tor work?

Before going to explore how Tor network works, we have to understand how cryptography works. Symmetric cryptography is a type of encryption method used to secure data. Generally a key is generated which is nothing but a mathematical function which encrypts (conversion of simple text to cipher text) the data and the same key is used to decrypt (conversion of cipher text to simple text) the data.

For example, consider a text “hello” which is converted to “jgnnq” by the encryption Algorithm, where the key is just the number 2, ‘h’ is changed to the next 2nd occurring alphabet which is ‘j’. Similarly, all other alphabets are changed in this manner.

Now how does Tor make use of this cryptography?

We know that in the Internet there are many servers present which are continuously involved in sending requests, making connections, being used as proxy servers, VPNs, providing web service and so on. The Tor network makes use of these servers to hide one’s identity and make them anonymous. Consider a user who makes a request for facebook.com in the Tor browser. Initially Tor randomly chooses 3 servers available in the Tor network. Then the Tor service generates 3 pairs of cryptographic keys. Then it shares half the pair of keys with the chosen servers. For convenience we shall call them key1, key2, key3 which are shared to three servers - server1, server2, server3.

Working of Tor 


1.The user requests for facebook.com from his system.

2.key1 is used initially to encrypt this request, then key2 is used to encrypt the request further and finally key3 is used to encrypt the request. Here we are using 3 keys in the order key1, key2, key3 to encrypt the message 3 times.

3. After carrying out triple layered encryption analogous to the peels of an onion (this is the reason why this network is known as the “onion network”), the system connects to the server3. This particular server is instructed to decrypt the message with its corresponding key-key3 and forward the request to server2.

4. server2 is instructed to decrypt the request with key2 and forward it to server1. Server1 does the same thing but it sends the request to Facebook server.

5.The response to this request is done in opposite manner.

Here server3 is the exit node which connects to the real server (facebook.com). Server1 is the user-side server which connects to user. The user in this network is completely anonymous to the Facebook server. Facebook does not know his IP address, location or any information as this request is sent by server1, and also the user doesn’t know about the Facebook server as well.

In this way the user gets the power to be anonymous and hide his IP address, location, sensitive information etc. from the end website in the internet. As data secure algorithms are used in this service, the response time is slower compared to the typical responses from a normal browser.

The traffic in the internet becomes anonymous and secure such that if any person in the middle tries to sniff the data, he/she will not get to know about the IP address of the user or client. Instead they will find a proxy server on the Internet.

How is this different from a Virtual Private Network?

VPNs uses a proxy server placed somewhere in the world to open a secure tunnel for the data packets to flow through the tunnel which are encrypted and secure. Here the VPN service providers will know your identity but the end servers won’t.

There are also some limitations associated with the Tor network

Though tor is a secure network there are some illegal websites present on the Tor network which can steal the data easily as the user does not know about the website he is connecting to. If the user doesn’t have the proper knowledge about the Tor he may lose his sensitive information like passwords.

So as we have seen in this blog, Tor is a beautiful tool to maintain anonymity in the open internet, it is an open-source network and it is providing a great service to the world.


By, 
Nagaprasad V R

  

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