Tor: A Private Tor Network for Education and Experimentation
Faculty Mentor
Antonio Espinoza
Presentation Type
Poster
Start Date
May 2025
End Date
May 2025
Location
PUB NCR
Primary Discipline of Presentation
Computer Science
Abstract
The Onion Router (Tor) is a de-centralized network that ensures user anonymity and data privacy by routing internet traffic through a series of nodes. Despite its security benefits, using Tor for research projects poses ethical and technical challenges, particularly due to Tor's complex network architecture and network administrators' hesitancy to allow Tor traffic. This project addresses these issues by configuring and hosting a private Tor network on Raspberry Pi devices, enabling the use of Tor in a secure and ethical environment. With this setup, researchers and students can implement and study de-anonymization attacks from any perspective without impacting the public Tor network. This setup offers a flexible framework for future scalability and diverse testing scenarios and has already been utilized within cybersecurity classes. Future work will focus on containerizing the network using Docker to provide each student with a private network of their own.
Recommended Citation
https://www.torproject.org/about/history/ https://witestlab.poly.edu/blog/anonymous-routing-of-network-traffic-using-tor/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Tor: A Private Tor Network for Education and Experimentation
PUB NCR
The Onion Router (Tor) is a de-centralized network that ensures user anonymity and data privacy by routing internet traffic through a series of nodes. Despite its security benefits, using Tor for research projects poses ethical and technical challenges, particularly due to Tor's complex network architecture and network administrators' hesitancy to allow Tor traffic. This project addresses these issues by configuring and hosting a private Tor network on Raspberry Pi devices, enabling the use of Tor in a secure and ethical environment. With this setup, researchers and students can implement and study de-anonymization attacks from any perspective without impacting the public Tor network. This setup offers a flexible framework for future scalability and diverse testing scenarios and has already been utilized within cybersecurity classes. Future work will focus on containerizing the network using Docker to provide each student with a private network of their own.
