What is Tor?
Tor is a protocol that enables anonymous communication over internet by routing traffic through many volunteer operated servers known as relays.
Tor provides anonymity by masking both client’s and the server’s IP addresses.
What is Onion Service?
An Onion Service is a service hosted on the Tor network that is only accessible through the Tor network using a .onion address. These services are designed to provide the anonymity both for the users accessing the service and for the server hosting the service.
Forwarding Tor Traffic to Local Server via Onion Address
Step 1: Setting up Tor Network
Install tor on the machine
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tor
Step 2: Configure tor Hidden Service
We will need to configure Tor to run hidden service
We need to edit /etc/tor/torrc file
Add the following lines in the configuration
# Setting up hidden service (Onion Service)
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:3000
HiddenServiceDir: Tor will store the data of our hidden service in this directory.
HiddenServicePort: This tells tor to redirect incoming traffic on port 80 of the .onion address to our local server running on port 3000
Step 3: Restart Tor Service
We will need to restart the Tor service to load the new configuration
sudo systemctl restart tor
Step 4: Retrieve .onion Address
After Tor has restarted, it will create the hidden service files in the directory that we have specified above. In our case it is /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/.
cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname
Since it is not safe to share the .onion address of our hidden service publicly, we are going to use examplexyz.onion as our tor onion service url
Step 5: Setup basic Flask Server
Before that, create a virtual environment using
python3 -m venv myenv
source myenv/bin/activate # to activate the environment
Install flask to setup flask server
pip install flask
Create a file server.py and write this script
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def home():
return {
"message": "We are talking from on tor network",
"status": "success"
}
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True, port=3000)
python server.py
Step 6: Looking at the response
Go to the Tor address examplexyz.onion on any device with Tor installed, and you will see a response like this.
