Setting Up Tor On Arch Linux
Taha Azzaoui - 2018.10.29
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
-
Start by installing
tor
andtorsocks
. The former is vanilla tor and the latter will let us “torify” an applicationsudo pacman -S tor torsocks
-
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
-
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 -
Append the following into
/etc/tor/torrc
. Make sure to replace the bridges with the ones obtained aboveUseBridges 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 -
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
-
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, runtorify 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
.