The Tor Field Guide

Three Strangers and a Sealed Note

Tor is a network of a few thousand volunteer-run relays. When your browser visits a site, it doesn’t go straight there. It builds a circuit — a path through three relays, chosen at random — and wraps your traffic in three layers of encryption, one per relay, like a note sealed inside three nested envelopes.

• Guard (entry) relay: knows your IP address. Sees only encrypted traffic and knows only which relay comes next. Cannot see what you’re doing.
• Middle relay: knows nothing but the relays on either side of it. The network’s amnesiac middleman.
• Exit relay (clearnet browsing only): knows the destination site. Doesn’t know who you are. For .onion sites there is no exit at all — traffic never leaves the network.

Each relay peels exactly one layer and learns exactly one hop. No single relay — and no one watching a single point — can connect you to where you went. Circuits rotate roughly every ten minutes, and Tor Browser gives each site its own circuit, so your activity on one site isn’t chained to another. Your guard relay stays fixed for weeks at a time on purpose: rotating guards constantly would eventually hand you a malicious one; a stable guard is a security feature, not a leak.

Get Connected (10 Minutes, Done Right)

1. Download Tor Browser only from torproject.org. Not an app-store clone, not a "Tor VPN" knockoff, not a random mirror. Most fake "Tor browsers" are exactly the malware they pretend to protect you from.
2. Verify the signature if you can — the Tor Project publishes a PGP signing key and a fingerprint check on its download page. Two minutes of paranoia, done once.
3. Install, hit Connect. That’s the whole setup for most people. Tor Browser is hardened Firefox with the network built in — no proxy settings, no add-ons needed.
4. If Tor is blocked where you are, use a built-in bridge: Settings → Tor → Bridges. Snowflake disguises you as a video call, obfs4 makes your traffic look like random noise, meek tunnels through big cloud domains. Try Snowflake first — it needs no setup codes.
5. Pick a security level: Settings → Privacy and Security. Standard is fine for reading. Safer kills JavaScript on non-HTTPS sites and mutes autoplay media. Safest kills JavaScript everywhere — maximum cover, and half the modern web breaks. Onion directories like this one are static HTML and run happily on Safest.
6. Leave the window size alone. Tor Browser letterboxes the page on purpose so your screen size doesn’t fingerprint you. Maximizing the window is spray-painting your monitor’s serial number on your traffic.

How .onion Really Works (The Good Part)

That 56-character address isn’t a name somebody registered. It is the service’s public key — an ed25519 key, plus a checksum and version byte, encoded. There is no registrar, no DNS, no certificate authority. When the address loads, the service proved it holds the matching private key during the connection itself. A fake TORDIR at our address isn’t unlikely — it’s mathematically off the table. That’s why the address is long: the security is the length.

When you visit an onion service, neither side ever connects to the other:

1. The service picks a few relays as its introduction points and publishes a signed descriptor — "reach me here, prove it with this key" — to a distributed hash table run by the relays themselves.
2. Your browser fetches that descriptor, picks a random relay as a rendezvous point, and builds a three-hop circuit to it.
3. The service builds its own three-hop circuit to the same point. You meet in the middle — six hops total — and neither side has ever seen the other’s IP address.

The service never opens a connection to you. Its server can sit behind a home router with no public IP at all. This is why onion services are nearly impossible to take down by finding the host: on the network, there is no host address to find.

Reaching the Real TORDIR

The directory itself lives on Tor. This address is the front door:

1. Open Tor Browser and paste the address in. First load can take 10–20 seconds — circuits are built fresh. That’s normal, not broken.
2. Cross-check the address against this page. Because the address is self-authenticating, an exact match is proof — no certificate warnings to click through, ever. If an "onion site" ever asks you to ignore a warning, it isn’t one.
3. For the full directory data, grab the signed bundle on the onion and check it against the project key (on the policy page):

gpg --import pubkey.asc
gpg --verify addresses.txt.asc addresses.txt

"Good signature" means the list in your hands is the list the project published — byte for byte.

Don’t Get Sloppy

• Tor hides where you are, not who you are. Log into your personal account over Tor and you’ve gift-wrapped your identity for the site — the network did its job, you undid it. Keep anonymous activity in its own world.
• Don’t torrent over Tor. It’s slow, it hammers volunteer relays, and torrent clients love leaking your real IP around the tunnel. Triple loss.
• Don’t install add-ons or "improve" the browser. Every extension changes your fingerprint and adds attack surface. The stock browser is the camouflage — everyone running stock looks alike.
• Don’t open documents downloaded over Tor while online unless you know what you’re doing. A PDF can phone home from outside the browser, over your real connection. View offline, or not at all.
• Skip the VPN debate. A VPN in front of Tor hides Tor use from your ISP but hands a company a permanent record of when you used it. Default answer: you don’t need one. Add one only if you can name the exact threat it answers.
• Keep Tor Browser updated. It nags for a reason — most real-world Tor deanonymizations ride browser exploits, not broken cryptography.

Honest Caveats

• It’s slow, by design. Three hops through volunteer relays on three continents. You’re trading speed for the math above. Text loads fine; stream your movies somewhere else.
• A global observer is the theoretical limit. An adversary watching both ends of the network at once can try timing correlation. Tor raises that cost enormously; nothing available to the public erases it. Know the ceiling.
• Clearnet browsing exits are the weak seam — an exit relay can watch unencrypted traffic. Onion-to-onion has no exit, and HTTPS covers most of the rest. Another reason the real directory lives where it lives.
• Your endpoint is still yours. A compromised device beats any network. Same rule as everywhere else in this project: the cryptography is strong, the human is the frontier.

Go deeper with the source: the official Tor Browser manual and the Tor Project support portal — and our own methodology page explains how this directory uses the network it lives on.