Portable Tor Router: Easily Enabling Web Privacy for Consumers

TL;DR

This paper presents a portable, affordable Tor-based router using a single-board computer that enhances online privacy for consumers by masking IP addresses and encrypting data, balancing cost, usability, and speed.

Contribution

The authors developed a low-cost, easy-to-use portable Tor router that effectively improves online privacy without sacrificing significant functionality or speed.

Findings

Cost of approximately $100 USD

Achieved around 2 Mbps speed

Successfully met five out of six privacy and usability goals

Abstract

On-line privacy is of major public concern. Unfortunately, for the average consumer, there is no simple mechanism to browse the Internet privately on multiple devices. Most available Internet privacy mechanisms are either expensive, not readily available, untrusted, or simply provide trivial information masking. We propose that the simplest, most effective and inexpensive way of gaining privacy, without sacrificing unnecessary amounts of functionality and speed, is to mask the user's IP address while also encrypting all data. We hypothesized that the Tor protocol is aptly suited to address these needs. With this in mind we implemented a Tor router using a single board computer and the open-source Tor protocol code. We found that our proposed solution was able to meet five of our six goals soon after its implementation: cost effectiveness, immediacy of privacy, simplicity of use, ease of execution, and unimpaired functionality. Our final criterion of speed was sacrificed for greater privacy but it did not fall so low as to impair day-to-day functionality. With a total cost of roughly $100.00 USD and a speed cap of around 2 Megabits per second we were able to meet our goal of an affordable, convenient, and usable solution to increased on-line privacy for the average consumer.