From WikiLeaks

The following method requires some technical ability. If you are used to installing new software and configuring proxy servers you should have the required skills, otherwise you may wish to use one of our other submission methods. Don't let the technology defeat you!

Tor, or The Onion Router, is a cryptographic technique first implemented by US Navy research to permit intelligence agents to use the internet without being traced, by encrypting and routing communications through many different internet servers. Subsequently, Tor has been developed by the US university MIT and by the California internet rights watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation and subsequently incorporated into Wikileaks.

Using our anonymous access package (see below) you can prevent internet spies knowing that your computer has connected to Wikileaks.

Most Wikileakers do not need this extra security, and there are simpler and possibly safer alternatives for once-off high-risk leaks (see Submissions). But for those who are at risk and want to access Wikileaks from the comfort of their homes or offices or need to bypass Internet censorship, Tor (Onion Routing) is an excellent solution.

When you have installed our Tor access package (see below), you may then connect to Wikileaks via our anonymous address (the ".onion" is short for "Onion Routing", but you do not need to be concerned with this detail). NB: the original .onion link for browsing Wikileaks is currently unavailable; however, if you have installed Tor and are redirecting all of your browsing through the Tor network, you can still browse the normal WikiLeaks site with a high degree of anonymity (but not end-to-end encryption). The secure .onion address provided here and on the submissions page should still work, in any case.



To upload a document anonymously using Tor:

http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/

(this link will only work once you have installed and configured Tor.)

Unless your memory is superb you may wish to write that address down — you may wish to destroy the paper after you are finished with it.

Without Tor, when you access a Wikileaks site the usual way, e.g via https://wikileaks.org/ all your data is encrypted, but internet spies maybe able note how long your computer spent talking to Wikileaks servers. See Connection Anonymity for further discussion.

Wikileaks Tor uses fully encrypted end-to-end anonymous connections. Accidental misconfiguration is impossible and at no stage does your communication leave the encrypted network.

The cost of this anonymity is speed, with page loads taking on average 15 seconds but sometimes as many as 60. File uploads to our servers tend to happen at 5 to 30 kilobytes per second.

I nstalling Tor

If you don't have it already, install the Firefox web-browser. Other web-browsers will work with Tor, but you will have to configure the "proxy servers" manually. Under Windows at least, this will be performed automatically if you have Firefox. Goto http://tor.eff.org/ and download, install and configure Tor. start Firefox. Visit http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/

Tor is usually VERY SLOW. Page load times of 5-60 seconds are normal. Please be patient.

H ow Tor works

Tor helps to reduce the risks of both simple and sophisticated traffic analysis by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you—and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going.





To create a private network pathway with Tor, the user's software or client incrementally builds a circuit of encrypted connections through servers on the network. The circuit is extended one hop at a time, and each server along the way knows only which server gave it data and which server it is giving data to. No individual server ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each hop along the circuit to ensure that each hop can't trace these connections as they pass through.





Once a circuit has been established, many kinds of data can be exchanged. Because each server sees no more than one hop in the circuit, neither an eavesdropper nor a compromised server can use traffic analysis to link the connection's source and destination.





For efficiency, the Tor software uses the same circuit for connections that happen within the same minute or so. Later requests are given a new circuit, to keep people from linking your earlier actions to the new ones.