From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
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Tor and perfect forward secrecy
From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
Tor and perfect forward secrecy
The Tor protocol provides an anonymous secure way for individuals to access the Internet. Tor also enables access to anonymous websites commonly known as the dark web. Tor, which stands for the Onion Router, uses encryption and relay nodes to hide the true source and destination of network communications. It's widely used in the security community, and it was made popular by NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, when he used it to transfer secrets to The Washington Post in 2013. Let's take a look at how Tor works. Suppose that we have a user, Alice, who wishes to visit a website but doesn't want the website to know her identity. She also doesn't want anyone along the way to know who she is. Alice opens a Tor browser on her computer and types in the website's URL, perhaps washingtonpost.com. Her browser then accesses a Tor directory server and loads a list of all the Tor nodes currently available on the Internet. That's a lengthy list, which includes every Tor node, and there were a lot of them.…