Encrypting your Internet traffic.
Every operation made in cyber space, every visited web site, and every web service accessed, leave traces of the user’s experience on the Internet. This information is considered very precious for commercial and intelligence purposes. Private companies and governments are constantly monitoring the World Wide Web to collect and correlate the information to use in analysis on the user’s behavior.
Unsecured networks present a major threat to your security. You don’t know who else is sharing the network, potentially intercepting and recording packets sent by your computer. Basic HTTPS web security does a good job of protecting data sent across the internet, but you are essentially at the mercy of the receiving site’s security protocols. If you’re transferring sensitive data, the sensible solution is to always use some kind of anonymizing service be it Tor, I2P or virtual private network.
Tor
Tor is a powerful, easy-to-use piece of software that lets you keep your online life private.
Tor provides truly anonymous and untraceable browsing and messaging, as well as access to the so-called “Deep Web” – a network of anonymous, untraceable, unblockable websites, available only through Tor, which provide everything from resources for political activists to pirated movies. The military-grade encryption behind Tor is so powerful that it can’t plausibly be broken by any organization on the planet.
The web browser “Tor,” part of the Tor Project, as it is called, was originally designed to protect Navy communications but is now being used by others for similar purposes. From the project’s website:
Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.
From the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory’s Center for High Assurance Computer Systems:
The Onion Routing program is made up of projects researching, designing, building, and analyzing anonymous communications systems. The focus is on practical systems for low-latency Internet-based connections that resist traffic analysis, eavesdropping, and other attacks both by outsiders (e.g. Internet routers) and insiders (Onion Routing servers themselves). Onion Routing prevents the transport medium from knowing who is communicating with whom — the network knows only that communication is taking place. In addition, the content of the communication is hidden from eavesdroppers up to the point where the traffic leaves the OR network.
How does it work?
Tor tunnels your traffic through an encrypted network of relays in which your IP-address can not be trace…………