What is the Tor browser?
The Tor (the onion routing) browser is a web browser designed for anonymous web surfing and protection against traffic analysis. Although Tor is often associated with the darknet and criminal activity, law enforcement officials, reporters, activists, whistleblowers and ordinary security-conscious individuals often use the browser for legitimate reasons.
The United States Navy originally designed the browser to protect sensitive U.S. government communications. While Tor continues to be used by the government, it is now an open source, multi-platform browser that is available to the public. Today, human rights activists and dissidents who need to keep their internet activities private from oppressive governments, law enforcement, intelligence agencies and criminals use Tor, for example.
Law enforcement agencies are able to use various techniques and tools to track down the users of Tor, especially if the sites they visit are not using end-to-end encryption . The browser uses exit relays and encrypted to hide user traffic within a network but leaves the endpoint more easily observable and has no effect beyond the boundaries of the network.
How Tor works
The Tor browser works by using a technology known as onion routing. The onion router is a peer-to-peer overlay network that enables users to browse the internet anonymously. Onion routing uses multiple layers of encryption to conceal both the source and destination of information sent over the network. It is designed so no one can monitor or censor online communication.
Once a user installs Tor, the browser uses Tor servers to send data to an exit node, which is the point at which data leaves the network. Once this data has been sent, it is encrypted multiple times before being sent to the next node. Repeating this process makes it difficult to trace the data back to the original source. In addition to encryption, the Tor browser does not track browsing history or store cookies
