Onion Pi — Make a Raspberry Pi Into a Anonymizing Tor Proxy 76
coop0030 writes "Feel like someone is snooping on you? Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy. This is fun weekend project from Adafruit that uses a Raspberry Pi, a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi."
Re:Neat idea. (Score:2, Informative)
Um... $50 dollar routers [amazon.com] have been done, for a few years now.
I know. I have one myself. But the cool thing about the Pi is you could run whatever software you like, or even write it yourself, and it would be open source. I'm frequently reading about vulnerabilities showing up in off the shelf routers. With a software solution on a Pi, you could patch and upgrade it yourself. And if it didn't offer the features you wanted, you could add them.
The cited router, runs Linux, with several distros with prepackaged TOR modules available. See openWrt, DDWrt, Tomato and more. Everything you suggest was done on the WRT54G 5 or more years ago. Raspberry Pi offers nothing new. It is under powered, lacks ports or WiFi, doesn't have established router software support... There is no advantage to using a Pi for a router over the linked router. None.
Danger (Score:5, Informative)
Note that routing through Tor can hide your location, but it will not protect unencrypted traffic from eavesdropping and MITM attacks.
I would caution strongly against indiscriminately running all your traffic trough Tor. In many cases this will increase your chance of being subject to an active or passive attack, as one of the reasons people operate Tor exit nodes is to observe the outgoing traffic, either for research or for more clandestine purposes.
Preferably only use it for encrypted traffic where you have a way to authenticate the other side. Routing TLS traffic through Tor should be fine for personal use, as long as you take care to never accept self-signed certificates.
Take the warnings seriously! (Score:5, Informative)
It is really no good using Tor when your application screams to the world who you are. Applications need to be carefully vetted in order to be sure they do not. Better use the Tor browser bundle from a clean system, than this "solution", unless you are really sure you know what you are doing.