Installing Tor in Kali Linux

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. 

This guide guides your through installing tor in Kali Linux.

Why anonymity matters?

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

[Source: https://www.torproject.org/]

Installing Tor in Kali Linux:

Step 1: Getting tor service ready

There are 3 ways of installing Tor service in Kali Linux. You can install Tor by following any of these options:

Option #1: Install Tor from Kali Repository

Tor is available in Kali repository, to install it directly from the repository open your Terminal and type this:

apt-get install tor

If no error occurs, follow the second step.

Option #2: Install Tor from Debian Wheezy Repository

If you can’t install Tor using the first method then you may try this option. In this way we are going to add the official Tor repository according to our Debian distribution. Not to be confused, Kali is actually based on Debian and it uses the package management from “Wheezy”. So we are going to use “Wheezy” as our distribution.
Now open your terminal and follow these steps:

Step #1: Add repo to sources.list file

Lets add the distribution in the list by opening the sources.list file

leafpad /etc/apt/sources.list

Now add the following line at the bottom of the file,

deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org wheezy main

Step #2: Add GPG Keys

Now we need to add the gpg key used to sign the packages by running the following commands:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89
gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | apt-key add -

Step #3: Update package lists

Lets refresh our sources:

apt-get update

Step #4: Install singing keys

Now, before installing the Tor we must add the signing key,

apt-get install deb.torproject.org-keyring

Step #5: Install Tor from Debian repository

Finally,

apt-get install tor

Now Tor should be installed!
If no error occurs, follow the second step.

Option #3: Install Tor from development branch

If you are an advanced user and you want to install Tor using the development branch then this method is for you.

Step #1: Add Tor project repository to sources.list

You need to add a different set of lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org wheezy main
deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org tor-experimental-0.2.5.x- wheezy main

Step #2: Add GPG keys, keyring and install Tor

Then run the following commands at your command prompt:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89
gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring

Now Tor should be installed!
If no error occurs, follow the second step.
Note: This release will provide you more features but it contains bugs too.

Option #4: Build and Install Tor from sources

If you want to build your own debs from source you must first add an appropriate deb-src line to sources.list.

deb-src http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org wheezy main
deb-src http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org wheezy main
deb-src http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org tor-experimental-0.2.5.x--wheezy main

You also need to install the necessary packages to build your own debs and the packages needed to build Tor:

apt-get install build-essential fakeroot devscripts
apt-get build-dep tor

Then you can build Tor in ~/debian-packages:

mkdir ~/debian-packages; cd ~/debian-packages
apt-get source tor
cd tor-*
debuild -rfakeroot -uc -us
cd ..

Now you can install the new package:

dpkg -i tor_*.deb

Step #2: Downloading and Running Tor bundle

Download the Tor Bundle from here,
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
Download the architecture-appropriate file above, save it somewhere, then run one of the following two commands to extract the package archive:

tar -xvzf tor-browser-gnu-linux-i686-2.3.25-15-dev-LANG.tar.gz

or (for the 64-bit version):

tar -xvzf tor-browser-gnu-linux-x86_64-2.3.25-16-dev-LANG.tar.gz

(where LANG is the language listed in the filename).
Once that’s done, switch to the Tor browser directory by running:

cd tor-browser_LANG

(whereLANG is the language listed in the filename).
To run the Tor Browser Bundle, execute the start-tor-browser script:

./start-tor-browser

This will launch Vidalia and once that connects to Tor, it will launch Firefox.

Note: Do not unpack or run TBB as root. (though in Kali Linux, it doesn’t make any differences)

Conclusion

How secured is TOR? It’s only as secured as the upstream nodes are! VPN is always better solution and to be honest, VPN is faster than TOR. In case you’ve already tried TOR and it didn’t hold up to your requirements, you should try to setup VPN to bypass security or restrictions. torsocks is another alternative to using TOR and it’s somewhat faster as there’s less users on that at anytime.

Thanks for reading. Please share with friends.