Tuesday Tech Tip: Anonymize your WiFi w/ TOR and a Raspberry Pi

Continuing our discussion of privacy and security while online, here’s a great tutorial from the folks at Lifehacker on how to set up an anonymous WiFi hot spot with the TOR browser and a Raspberry Pi. This one will take a little work to get up and running but here’s a tease to get you started:

If you’ve been thinking about trying out Tor to anonymize all your web browsing, you could just download a browser and give that a spin, but it’s much more fun to make your own highly portable proxy that you can easily connect to on a whim. Enter the Raspberry Pi. 

Tor is one of the easiest ways to browse the internet anonymously, though it does come at the cost of speed. In fact, it’s so absurdly slow that it’s pretty difficult to use for basic internet browsing. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful for other things, and since you likely don’t want to use it all the time, a quick way to switch between Tor and the regular internet is handy.

The Raspberry Pi can help here. First you need to turn a Raspberry Pi into an access point, much like a Wi-Fi hotspot, and then you install Tor on it so all the traffic that goes through that access point is anonymized.

When you want to use Tor, you just connect to the Raspberry Pi’s Wi-Fi network. When you don’t, you can use whatever network you use usually. The Tor Browser is always an option too, but you might not want to install software on all your devices. This is also nice to keep around the house if you’re the resident “tech person” because it makes it extremely simple to show someone what life would be like if actually decided to use Tor for their browsing (it would be slow).

What You Need

You don’t need anything special to make a Tor-powered Pi proxy, but you will need to round up a few materials before you get started:

• Raspberry Pi 3
• Micro USB power supply
• Ethernet cable
• 8GB MicroSD card
• Access to your home router
• Mouse/keyboard/desktop computer for the initial set up process

You’ll want to go ahead and set up your SD card with Raspbian and set up SSH as well. You can use either the standard version of Raspbian or the Lite version, as you’ll only be using the command line for this guide. Follow our guide here to set up Raspbian (be sure to change your default password during this process) and this guide to enable SSH if you want to talk to your Raspberry Pi from any computer on your home network.

Once you’ve gathered everything together, make sure your Raspberry Pi is connected directly to your router with an ethernet cable, then go ahead and plug it in.

Read the full instrucitons @ Lifehacker.com.