Anonabox & Tor (TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH)

Question

I'm using the Anonabox and, as its hardware connects to Tor, I'm looking for something similar to the 'transparent torification' option in the Tor browser (to avoid running everything through Tor twice). I've been told that "the new way of doing this is to use the TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1 as a command line argument for starting the Tor Browser". However, I am quite new to all this and slightly overwhelmed by the technical aspects of documentation I could find. Where does one enter this command? Is there any documentation available that can serve as a step-by-step guide?

Answer 1

Tor over Tor results in "undefined behavior," it sounds like a good idea, but may break in unexpected ways, like wearing 2 condoms. You should launch your Tor Browser with TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1 and ideally either change the network proxy settings to an open socks ports on your hardware Tor router (i.e. change the socks address from 127.0.0.1:9051 to 192.168.0.1:9050, for example) or better yet just use an iptables NAT redirect rule on your client machine to forward connections to 127.0.0.1:9051 to your Tor router's socks port, so you don't have to mess with any settings/redo them after every update.

This assumes your Tor router is configured to provide a SOCKSport and not just a TRANSport. If it doesn't, or you can't figure out how to connect to it, using TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1 and setting the transparent proxy option in Tor Button in the browser will work, but you just won't get the full stream isolation you would if you used a socksport and would be more vulnerable to correlation attacks as everything in the TRANSport gets pushed through the same circuit.