Okay.
So now that we have Tor browser installed, let's go ahead and make sure that it's working as expected
and is routing all of the traffic through the Tor network.
Now I'm going to be using the Tor browser on Windows, but as seen before, the interface is identical
on Windows, Linux and OS X.
The installation is different and I showed you how to install it on all of these operating systems.
So once it's installed, using the browser is exactly the same.
So I'm going to double click the launcher.
And as you can see, you get a normal browser window and don't maximize this window ever.
And I'll talk about that later.
But for now, just to check to make sure that tour is working, I'm going to go to check dot to project
dot org.
And as you can see, it's saying congratulations.
This browser is configured to use Tor and it's given us the IP that our browser appears to be coming
from.
So this is not my real IP.
This is the IP that I will appear that I'm coming from.
So this is all perfect and I'll talk about more Tor settings in a future lecture, but right now I want
to show you how to bypass Tor being blocked.
So in case you came to this website and it didn't load or if you saw a warning here say in Tor is not
working, then this could be because your network administrator or your internet service provider is
blocking you from using TOR.
See, when you try to access TOR.
As I mentioned before, the first thing you'll have to do is connect to the Tor network and send your
traffic to a random Tor node.
So you're going to pick one of these nodes and you're going to send your traffic through it as the first
node.
The problem is, before you can actually connect and send data to this node, your data can easily be
intercepted by your network administrator or your Internet service provider before it even reaches the
first node and before it's even able to connect to the Tor network.
So what your Internet service provider or ISP can do is they could identify all the available TOR nodes
right here, the white circles, because they are publicly available and then just block them all,
prevent you from connecting to any of these white circles.
So therefore, whenever you try to connect to Tor, you're passing by internet service provider, which
is running a firewall, checking if you're trying to connect to any of these nodes and if you are,
it will block your connection.
The result of this is when you come in to load this page, it will either not load or it's going to
tell you that you're not using the Tor network.
A simple solution to this is to use a tor bridge as the first node.
What we mean by ter bridges.
They are normal nodes similar to all the white circles that we can see in here, but they are not publicly
available.
So the only way that the internet service provider was able to block us is because they know all the
white circles, they know all the public nodes, and they have a rule in their firewall to prevent any
user from connecting to any of these white circles.
So to bypass this, we can just use a node that is not publicly available.
It's not being advertised that way.
When we try to connect to it, the Internet service provider will not have this node in its list and
therefore we can connect to it and then continue using it or going out to another website, or even
going in and accessing an onion service.
So this is pretty good.
It's a pretty good solution until firewalls and service providers became smarter and implemented more
advanced methods.
What they started doing is they started using deep packet filtering or what's known as the API to identify
third traffic and block it.
So they don't even care about which node you're trying to connect to.
They started analyzing all traffic that you sent out of your computer and they managed to identify what
your traffic looks like.
So like I said before, when you use Tor, they can't really see which websites you're trying to go
to, but they'll be able to see that you're trying to use the Tor network either by identifying the
node that you're trying to connect to or by using deep packet filtering, which will tell them that
the traffic of this user matches a signature of a tor traffic.
Therefore, this user is using Tor.
Therefore, we will block this traffic.
So the solution to this is to use a pluggable transport.
Pluggable transports will try to make your traffic look similar to any other normal traffic.
So when you're trying to connect to a bridge, we're going to use a bridge that can use a pluggable
transport.
And this way all the traffic that we're going to send will not look like Tor traffic.
It will look similar to traffic that's generated when you're trying to access Google or Facebook or
any other website similar to any normal web traffic.
Now.
This is a pretty good solution.
It will work in many cases, but it can still fail in some instances.
But the worst case scenario, even if it fails, the Internet service provider will be able to know
that you're using Tor.
But again, they won't really know which websites you're trying to access unless they run a more sophisticated
attack.
Now keep in mind this will slow down your connection.
So if you are able to browse this page and it's telling you that everything is working, then maybe
you don't you shouldn't really use them.
It really depends on your case.
And in the next lecture, I'm going to show you how to configure Tor to use a bridge with a pluggable
transport to access the Tor network, even if it's being blocked.