How to Use Tortunnel to Quickly Encrypt Internet Traffic

Encryped traffic and tunneling is a must when away from home to keep you and your information safe. SSH tunnels can be slow, and are heavily encrypted. VPNs are an all port solution, and proxies are just not what we need in most cases. Then, there is Tor.

Tor runs your traffic through 3 hops and multiple nodes to mask your IP via their onion-routing system. But, let's face it, Tor is slow. Having that many hops makes our ping delay increase dramatically. Moxie Marlinspike has created a nifty little tool that can send your traffic through a single Tor exit node called Tortunnel. Tortunnel is a partial onion proxy implementation that's designed to build single-hop circuits through Tor exit nodes. This is useful in cases where you might want a very low level of anonymity, and don't want to deal with the performance implications of using Tor's full three-hop circuits.

In this Null Byte, we are going to set up Tortunnel to push our traffic through, giving ourselves a light layer of anonymity and protection.

Requirements

• Root privelages

Let's get started!

Download & Install Tortunnel

All writing in bold means it is intended to be entered in a terminal emulator.

Let's start by downloading and configuring our Tortunnel software.

1. Download Totunnel from its official mirror:
   
   wget http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/tortunnel/tortunnel-0.3.tar.gz
2. Extract the archive:
   
   tar zxvf tortunnel-0.3.tar.gz
3. Change to the new directory:
   
       cd tortunnel-0.3
4. Configure the files:
   
     ./configure
5. Compile and install the program:
   
   sudo make && sudo make install

Set Up Our Tunnel

Now let's set up our Tortunnel to be ready to have traffic run through it.

1. Let's put a SOCKS interface on localhost port 5060:
   
   torproxy -p 5060 -r
2. That's all you need to do, but if you have a specific exit node you want to tunnel through, use this:
   
   torproxy -p 5060 -n
3. Open your browser (or another internet program) and change your network/proxy settings to:
   
   http://localhost:5060
   
   -OR-
   
   127.0.0.1:5060

Start some chatter in the IRC and the Forums for more Null Byte action!

Image by sidibousaid60