Facebook directly accessible via Tor

Facebook makes it possible to visit the Facebook servers directly from the Tor network, without having to use an exit node. The functionality should provide a better experience for Tor users in combination with Facebook.

Facebook’s Tor service can be accessed from the Tor browser at the url facebookcorewwwi.onion. Until now, an exit node was required to visit Facebook: such nodes are the link between the Tor network and the rest of the internet.

The downside of exitnodes is that they can be located anywhere in the world, and Facebook’s security mechanisms sometimes sounded the alarm if a user seemed to be in Canada one minute and Sweden the next. “However, this is normal for Tor traffic,” Facebook security officer Alec Muffett wrote.

The new Tor service should therefore provide a more streamlined experience, although Facebook is still unable to estimate exactly where a user is: thanks to the Tor network, his IP address has been anonymized.

Tor is software that allows users to browse the internet more or less anonymously. Activists and dissidents, among others, use the software in countries where there is internet censorship or where the government monitors internet use. Tor, originally developed by the US military, stands for The Onion Router in full.

In this context, ‘onion’ refers to the way the system works: Internet traffic is routed through several randomly chosen servers, with only the first server being visited knows the IP address of the user. Each server ‘peels’ a part of the Tor packets, as it were, hence the ‘ui’ analogy. An important part of the Tor network are the exit nodes: from there Tor traffic reaches the outside world. The exit node does not know who its users are, but to the outside world it seems that the traffic of the users comes from that exit node.