12 lines
680 B
Text
12 lines
680 B
Text
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The simple version: Tor provides a distributed network of servers ("onion
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routers"). Users bounce their TCP streams (web traffic, FTP, SSH, etc.) around
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the routers. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion
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routers themselves to track the source of the stream.
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The complex version: Onion Routing is a connection-oriented anonymizing
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communication service. Users choose a source-routed path through a set of
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nodes, and negotiate a "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each
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node knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic flowing down
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the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at each node, which reveals the
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downstream node.
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