To use a program over Tor, configure it to use 127.0.0.1 or localhost as a SOCKS5 proxy, with port 9050 for plain Tor with standard settings. Alternatively, launch it with sudo -u tor /usr/bin/tor.

Nyx is a command line monitor for Tor, it provides bandwidth usage, connection details and on-the-fly configuration editing. Usually, it will be used for #Web browsing. There are several major pitfalls to watch out for (see Am I totally anonymous if I use Tor?). Note: Tor by itself is not all you need to maintain anonymity. See Wikipedia:Tor (anonymity network) for more information. the traffic entering and exiting the network). Additionally, although Tor provides protection against traffic analysis it cannot prevent traffic confirmation at the boundaries of the Tor network (i.e. One trade off that has to be made for the anonymity Tor provides is that it can be considerably slower than a regular direct connection, due to the large amount of traffic re-routing. It keeps a user anonymous by encrypting traffic, sending it through other nodes of the Tor network, and decrypting it at the last node to receive your traffic before forwarding it to the server you specified.

Through this process the onion proxy manages networking traffic for end-user anonymity. Tor employs cryptography in a layered manner (hence the 'onion' analogy), ensuring forward secrecy between routers.

This software connects out to Tor, periodically negotiating a virtual circuit through the Tor network. Users of the Tor network run an onion proxy software on their machines, which presents a SOCKS interface to its clients. Its primary goal is to enable online anonymity by protecting against traffic analysis attacks. The Tor Project ( The onion routing) is an open source implementation of onion routing that provides free access to an anonymous proxy network.

Onion router