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So now that we have Tor browser installed, let's go ahead and make sure that it's working as expected

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and is routing all of the traffic through the Tor network.

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Now I'm going to be using the Tor browser on Windows, but as seen before, the interface is identical

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on Windows, Linux and OSX.

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The installation is different and I showed you how to install it on all of these operating systems.

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So once it's installed, using the browser is exactly the same.

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So I'm going to double click the launcher.

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The first time you run it, it's going to ask you if you want to connect to the Tor network and you

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can tick this box so that it automatically connects to the Tor network.

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So I'm going to tick the box and I'm going to click on Connect.

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Once connected, I'm going to double check that I am actually connected to the Tor network by going

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to check dot tor project.org.

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And as you can see, it's saying Congratulations.

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This browser is configured to use Tor and it's given us the IP that our browser appears to be coming

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from.

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So this is not my real IP.

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This is the IP that I will appear that I'm coming from.

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So this is all perfect and I'll talk about more Tor settings in a future lecture.

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But right now I want to show you how to bypass Tor being blocked.

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So in case you came to this website and it didn't load, or if you saw a warning here saying Tor is

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not working, then this could be because your network administrator or your internet service provider

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is blocking you from using TOR.

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See, when you try to access Tor, as I mentioned before, the first thing you'll have to do is connect

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to the Tor network and send your traffic to a random Tor node.

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So you're going to pick one of these nodes and you're going to send your traffic through it as the first

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node.

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The problem is before you can actually connect and send data to this node, your data can easily be

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intercepted by your network administrator or your Internet service provider before it even reaches the

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first node and before it's even able to connect to the Tor network.

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So what your Internet service provider or ISP can do is they could identify all the available Tor nodes

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right here, the white circles, because they are publicly available and then just block them all,

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prevent you from connecting to any of these white circles.

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So therefore, whenever you try to connect to Tor, you're passing by Internet service provider, which

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is running a firewall, checking if you're trying to connect to any of these nodes.

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And if you are, it will block your connection.

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The result of this is when you come in to load this page, It will either not load or it's going to

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tell you that you're not using the Tor network.

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A simple solution to this is to use a Tor bridge as the first node.

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What we mean by third bridges.

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They are normal nodes similar to all the white circles that we can see in here, but they are not publicly

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available.

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So the only way that the Internet service provider was able to block us is because they know all the

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white circles, they know all the public nodes, and they have a rule in their firewall to prevent any

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user from connecting to any of these white circles.

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So to bypass this, we can just use a node that is not publicly available.

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It's not being advertised that way.

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When we try to connect to it, the Internet service provider will not have this node in its list and

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therefore we can connect to it and then continue using Tor going out to another website or even going

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in and accessing an onion service.

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So this is pretty good.

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It's a pretty good solution.

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Until firewalls and service providers became smarter and implemented more advanced methods, what they

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started doing is they started using deep packet filtering or what's known as DPI to identify tor traffic

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and block it.

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So they don't even care about which node you're trying to connect to.

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They started analyzing all traffic that you sent out of your computer, and they managed to identify

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what your traffic looks like.

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So like I said before, when you use Tor, they can't really see which websites you're trying to go

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to, but they'll be able to see that you're trying to use the Tor network either by identifying the

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node that you're trying to connect to or by using deep packet filtering, which will tell them that

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the traffic of this user matches a signature of a tor traffic.

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Therefore this user is using tor.

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Therefore we will block this traffic.

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So the solution to this is to use a pluggable transport.

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Pluggable transports will try to make your traffic look similar to any other normal traffic.

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So when you're trying to connect to a bridge, we're going to use a bridge that can use a pluggable

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transport.

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And this way all the traffic that we're going to send will not look like tor traffic.

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It will look similar to traffic that's generated when you're trying to access Google or Facebook or

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any other website similar to any normal web traffic.

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Now, this is a pretty good solution.

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It will work in many cases, but it can still fail in some instances.

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But the worst case scenario, even if it fails, the Internet service provider will be able to know

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that you're using Tor.

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But again, they won't really know which websites you're trying to access unless they run a more sophisticated

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attack.

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Now, keep in mind, this will slow down your connection.

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So if you were able to browse this page and it's telling you that everything is working, then maybe

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you don't you shouldn't really use them.

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It really depends on your case.

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And in the next lecture I'm going to show you how to configure Tor to use a bridge with a pluggable

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transport to access the Tor network, even if it's being blocked.