Intro

I’m assuming most know what Tor is, but for those who don’t, Tor is basically a networking protocol that aids against traffic analysis attacks by bouncing your Internet requests through a network of relays (servers) around the globe. I won’t go into how it works for now, the Tor Project covers it extensively. Let’s look at setting it up on Arch.

Systemd & The Tor Service

1. Start by installing tor and torsocks. The former is vanilla tor and the latter will let us “torify” an application

   sudo pacman -S tor torsocks

2. For those in areas where Tor is blocked (China), we’ll also install the obfuscation protocol obfs4. It’s available in the AUR.

   yaourt -S obfs4proxy

3. Now we need to get some bridges to use. Head over to https://bridges.torproject.org/options to acquire an obfs4 bridge. You should end up with something like this:

   obfs4 <IP> <Giberish> cert=<More Giberish> iat-mode=0
   obfs4 <IP> <Giberish> cert=<More Giberish> iat-mode=0
   obfs4 <IP> <Giberish> cert=<More Giberish> iat-mode=0
   

4. Append the following into /etc/tor/torrc. Make sure to replace the bridges with the ones obtained above

   UseBridges 1
   # Substitute the following with the bridges you aquired from step 3
   bridge obfs4 <IP> <Giberish> cert=<More Giberish> iat-mode=0
   bridge obfs4 <IP> <Giberish> cert=<More Giberish> iat-mode=0
   bridge obfs4 <IP> <Giberish> cert=<More Giberish> iat-mode=0
   ClientTransportPlugin obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy managed
   

5. Start the Tor service using systemctl

   sudo systemctl start tor.service
   

   To check if it worked, run

   sudo systemctl status tor.service
   

   If all is well, you should see the following message

   Bootstrapped 100%: Done
   

   towards the end of the status message

6. Run applications with Tor

   Now that we have Tor working, we can run applications though it. To use Tor with an application you can use the torify command. For example, torify bash will bring up a bash shell running Tor. To verify, run

   torify bash
curl ipinfo.io
   

   and you should see that the IP address shown is not your actual IP address.

The GUI Route

Note that if you plan on using Tor for browsing the web, you can also install tor-browser from the AUR which is essentially a hardened Firefox that comes with Tor built in along with some useful addons like noscript.