TOR As A SOCKS Proxy

Almost all applications and web sites are trying to learn who we are and what we are looking for on the internet. These informations are being used for many different reasons like advertisements and to detect malicious attempts. Again, for many reasons, it is very important to surf internet anonymously. Tor is used for anonymous surfing all over the world. It is free to install and use in both Windows, Linux and OS X operating systems. 

It is very easy to install Tor and use as a browser in operating systems, however it will not be enough to use it as a browser only especially you want to use some other applications anonymously. For using other applications and command line tools anonymously, Tor SOCKS proxy needs to be installed. 

For installation, we need to add related software repositories, so we edit the sources.list file;

        # vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Then, we are adding the line below, to the bottom of the sources.list file. 

        deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org wheezy main

We need to introduce the software repository's key (gpg key) to the system;

        # gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89

        # gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -

Now, start Tor and check the service if it is running;

        # /etc/init.d/tor start

        # service tor status

If the Tor service is running successfully, you need to see output as above. We need to enter one more command to start Tor service automatically after rebooting the machine. 

        # update-rc.d tor enable

After you enter this command, you can test it with rebooting the system. After reboot, check the status of the service;

        # service tor status

Now, this means we can use Tor for all applications that are supporting SOCKS proxy. For test, you can use Firefox. Change the proxy settings as localhost:9050 and check your IP address. Tor is using 9050 as default.