Using Tor Open Source Project

Have you ever heard of Vidalia ? or Tor ? Vidalia is a client of Tor, a open source project that are mainly used to protect users privacy. I have just installed Vidalia on my mac and i started to understand why this application is really useful. Below is how Tor works: Tor helps to reduce the risks of both simple and sophisticated traffic analysis by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you —

and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.

To create a private network pathway with Tor, the user’s software or client incrementally builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the network. The circuit is extended one hop at a time, and each relay along the way knows only which relay gave it data and which relay it is giving data to. No individual relay ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each hop along the circuit to ensure that each hop can’t trace these connections as they pass through.

Once a circuit has been established, many kinds of data can be exchanged and several different sorts of software applications can be deployed over the Tor network. Because each relay sees no more than one hop in the circuit, neither an eavesdropper nor a compromised relay can use traffic analysis to link the connection’s source and destination. Tor only works for TCP streams and can be used by any application with SOCKS support. For efficiency, the Tor software uses the same circuit for connections that happen within the same ten minutes or so. Later requests are given a new circuit, to keep people from linking your earlier actions to the new ones.

One of the Tor client is Vidalia which is running on Windows, Mac, or X11 operating system. You can get vidalia from vidalia-project.net Once you have installed and run the vidalia, you can go to google and you can see that your IP is ranging from all over the places (eg. Im in Malaysia, but when i tried to google.com, it will appears as if Im in Romania, France, Netherlands, etc) which makes track routing is difficult and hackers safe.

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