Tor: Anonymity For Better or For Worse

Why use Tor?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) already provides privacy by encrypting the data sent over a connection between a client and a server. An eavesdropper on the wire will not be able to read the data sent from your machine if the data is sent over a connection that uses TLS. Is this always enough?

Imagine you are trying to access a website that is banned in your country. You could potentially face time in prison for accessing these websites. It is not enough that the messages to the web server of the website are encrypted; you need to prevent any entity monitoring your network such as the Government or an ISP from seeing which servers your machine visits. What you desire is anonymity. Sometimes, you might want anonymity when privacy is not necessary. For example, a user might want to be anonymous from the web server of the site that they are visiting. In particular, they may want to prevent their search engine from creating a personalized profile of their search history which can be sold to advertisers. However, they might not care if the search requests themselves are private.

Would a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or a proxy server be enough to ensure anonymity? While these services do provide partial anonymity to their users from eavesdroppers and destination servers, the VPN or Proxy provider can still track the users’ traffic history. In other words, VPNs and Proxies provide limited anonymity against government entities since the VPN/Proxy provider can be subpoenaed into…