52 — Portable Tor Router: Easily Enabling Web Privacy for Consumers

Using a Raspberry Pi, the authors of this paper demonstrate that they are able to provide a reliable Tor Router to serve secure internet to downstream devices.

The Pi runs DHCP and router software, and uses an external Wi-Fi dongle to broadcast. With a WiFi-in / WiFi-out setup like this, the Pi can be dropped in a backpack and used while traveling or out of the house. In-the-wild speed tests point to up/down speeds of around 2Mb/s (fairly common for Tor nodes).

The setup doesn’t secure traffic within the network at all — plaintext packets can still be sent over unsecure HTTP before reaching the router; the onus is on the user to trust all devices and executables running on the network.

I thought it was interesting that the authors chose to use a Google DNS: I would imagine that the target of this product would be individuals aiming to maximize privacy and insulation from tracking by companies such as Google. The DNS requests did seem to be routed through Tor, but — though I don’t have specific technical experience in this field — I imagine sets of DNS requests are among the simplest to correlate to a person or subpopulation.