Your own internal TOR proxy [Guide]

Dfg

or those who don't know, TOR stands for the The Onion Router. TOR provides anonymous (FYI this differs from secure) access to the internet by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol. (src) Think of it like every movie which has an evil hacker "He is untraceable, he is bouncing from USA to Africa to France etc..)

I have been an off-and-on again user of TOR for several years, however I really never found the "killer purpose" for using it -- After all I no longer pretend to be that bad guy hacker in a poorly written movie. However this weekend, @Surbo brought up an interesting situation: He noticed that a malicious site (which happened to be actively targeting our company) disappeared and changed tactics as soon as he started investigating it. He was concerned that the bad guys were watching THEIR logs, and took action when they saw him knocking on their door. That got me thinking, it would be nice if we had a centralized TOR server that my team could use every time we wanted to "investigate" a foreign site.

The following tutorial will walk you through setting up this centralized TOR proxy, which allows for multiple computers to easily connect and disconnect with a simple click of the mouse (and very little software to install).


Requirements:

Always on computer (This will be the TOR proxy, from now on referenced as ComputerA)
Second computer (This can be a desktop/laptop/iphone whatever, from now on referenced as ComputerB)
Basic networking and sub-netting concepts

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Basically, you just set up tor on your local network and then connect all other tor clients to your main tor server.

It's like ordinary proxy but instead of running a proxy server you're using tor and then forcing other computers to connect to the main system via Firefox and SOCKS.

It's pretty simple and damn easy and potentially great if you want to enable Tor throughout your network or home network.

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That's awesome! Thanks for posting this Dfg, I was actually thinking about getting something like this set up just the other day. It would be cool to do.