Tor Router

Tor Router is a SOCKS5, DNS and HTTP proxy server for distributing traffic across multiple instances of Tor. At startup Tor Router will run an arbitrary number of instances Tor and each request will be sent to a different instance in round-robin fashion. This can be used to increase anonymity, because each request will be sent on a different circuit and will most likely use a different exit-node, and also to increase performance since outbound traffic is now split across several instances of Tor.

A list of changes can be found here.

Building and Running

The only installation requirement is node.js. Tor is bundled with the application. To use an external Tor executable use the --torPath command line switch or set the TOR_PATH environment variable.

To install run: npm install To start run: bin/tor-router

To install globally run: npm install -g tor-router

Alternatively docker can be used. The build will retrieve the latest version of Tor from the offical Tor Project repository.

To build run: docker build -t znetstar/tor-router . To start run: docker run --rm -it -p 9050:9050 znetstar/tor-router

Usage

The following command line switches and their environment variable equivalents are available for use:

If just a port number is passed in place of a host, it will bind to all interfaces.

Command line switch	Environment Variable	Description
-f, --config		Path to a JSON configuration file to use
-c, --controlHost	CONTROL_HOST	Host the control server will bind to and listen for TCP traffic (see below)
-w, --websocketControlHost	WEBSOCKET_CONTROL_HOST	Host the control server will bind to and listen for WebSocket traffic
-j, --instances	INSTANCES	Number of Tor instances to spawn
-s, --socksHost	SOCKS_HOST	Host the SOCKS proxy will bind to
-d, --dnsHost	DNS_HOST	Host the DNS proxy will bind to
-h, --httpHost	HTTP_HOST	Host the HTTP proxy will bind to
-l, --logLevel	LOG_LEVEL	Log level (defaults to "info") set to "null" to disable logging. To see a log of all network traffic set logLevel to "verbose"
-p, --parentDataDirectory	PARENT_DATA_DIRECTORY	Parent directory that will contain the data directories for the instances
-b, --loadBalanceMethod	LOAD_BALANCE_METHOD	Method that will be used to sort the instances between each request. Currently supports "round_robin" and "weighted".
-t, --torPath	TOR_PATH	Provide the path for the Tor executable that will be used
-n, --proxyByName	PROXY_BY_NAME	Controls how authenticated requests will be handled. Can be set to "individual", "group" or false to disable

A full list of all available configuration options and their defaults can be found in default_config.js

For example: tor-router -j 3 -s 127.0.0.1:9050 would start the proxy with 3 tor instances and listen for SOCKS connections on localhost:9050.

Documentation

For detailed examples and insturctions on using Tor Router see the wiki.

Documentation is available in docs/. An online version of the documentation is also available here.

Testing

Tests are written in mocha and can be found under test/ and can be run with npm test