by Jon Brodkin
The do-it-yourselfers at Adafruit have provided step-by-step instructions for turning a Raspberry Pi into a Tor proxy and wireless access point. A good project for users looking to anonymize their Internet traffic, “Onion Pi” requires just a Raspberry Pi, a few standard peripherals, and some work in the command line.
You’ll need a Pi (of course), an Ethernet cable, a Wi-Fi adapter with an antenna, an SD card loaded with the Raspbian operating system, and a power supply. You can buy all these from Adafruit in the company’s Onion Pi Pack, but the components are pretty standard and could be obtained from many other sources. A portion of sales through Adafruit will go to the Tor Foundation.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is excited about the project, saying it could let users “Foil the NSA and Prism with a Tor proxy.” Using Tor routes your Internet traffic through several relays in an attempt to hide your location and identity.
“Using it is easy-as-pie,” Adafruit wrote. “First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider [sic] in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the Micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network.”
Users would install Tor through the command line, then edit the host access point to something like “Onion Pi” and change the network password. A few more commands then change the IP routing tables to route Wi-Fi connections through Tor.
If all gets set up right, you’ll be able to connect to the access point from a computer, smartphone, or tablet just like you normally would. For extra credit, you could set up your Pi as a Tor relay to help improve the Tor network for all its users. Get started with Onion Pi by checking out Adafruit’s tutorial.