4 Maintainer: Peter Palfrader <weasel@debian.org>
5 Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 4.1.65), libssl-dev, dpatch
6 Standards-Version: 3.6.1
10 Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, adduser, tsocks
11 Recommends: privoxy, socat
12 Suggests: mixmaster, mixminion, anon-proxy
13 Description: anonymizing overlay network for TCP
14 Tor is a connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system which
15 addresses many flaws in the original onion routing design.
17 In brief, Onion Routing is a connection-oriented anonymizing communication
18 service. Users choose a source-routed path through a set of nodes, and
19 negotiate a "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each node
20 knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic flowing down
21 the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at each node, which reveals
24 Basically Tor provides a distributed network of servers ("onion
25 routers"). Users bounce their tcp streams (web traffic, ftp, ssh, etc)
26 around the routers, and recipients, observers, and even the routers
27 themselves have difficulty tracking the source of the stream.
29 Note that Tor does no protocol cleaning. That means there is a danger that
30 application protocols and associated programs can be induced to reveal
31 information about the initiator. Tor depends on Privoxy and similar protocol
32 cleaners to solve this problem.
34 Client applications can use the Tor network by connecting to the local
35 onion proxy. If the application itself does not come with socks support
36 you can use a socks client such as tsocks. Some web browsers like mozilla
37 and web proxies like privoxy come with socks support, so you don't need an
38 extra socks client if you want to use Tor with them.
40 This package enables only the onion proxy by default, but it can be configured
41 as a relay (server) node.
43 Remember that this is alpha code, and the network is very small -- Tor will
44 not provide anonymity currently.
46 The latest information can be found at http://freehaven.net/tor/, or on the
47 mailing lists, archived at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/ or
48 http://archives.seul.org/or/announce/.