.. _tor-concept:

TOR
===

The Onion Router, or TOR, is a free and open source software that enables anonymous communication. By routing Internet traffic though a worldwide, volunteer overlay network of nodes, requests are bundled in layers of encryption like the layers of an onion. The request is relayed across nodes, decrypting a layer only to reveal the next relay destination, until the request meets its final destination, without revealing the source IP address.

If a malicious third party were to intercept a request, they would see a garbled mess of the remaining onion encryption, and would only know that it came from some onion node and was heading to some other onion node. The contents, source, and destination of the message are totally anonymous.

When you use Tor to communicate with services running on the Embassy, all the traffic is onion routed and encrypted, and there are no Tor exit nodes involved - it's totally private with no configuration needed.

Furthermore, every service on the Embassy has a different Tor address, including the device itself. This is for privacy reasons - should one Tor address be exposed, the others will not be compromised. Tor addresses are actually ed25519 keys, which means they also provide all the benefits of cryptographically secure private/public keys.