Portable Tor Router: Easily Enabling Web Privacy for Consumers
Adrian Barberis, Danny Radosevich, Wyatt Emery, and Mike Borowczak

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…
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