How does tor work?

How does tor work?

Tor browser, as the name suggests, works on the onion routing protocol. It encrypts the message in layers of encryption and sends it over several relaysThey are tor servers used to route traffic on the tor network.. The onion routing is explained in the following section:

Onion routing

The working of the onion routing is described as follows:

1. First, we generate a request that they want to send to a server, such as Google, over the tor network.

2. We then decides the three relays that they want to use to route this request, for example $R1, R2, R3.$

3. We acquire the public keys to these three relays ($R1_p, R2_p, R3_p$).

4. We encrypt the message $m$using google's public key $G_p$ and obtain the encrypted message $m'.$

5. We encrypt the $m'$ using the public key of the third relay $R3_p$ and obtain $m''.$

6. We encrypt the $m''$using the public key of the second relay $R2_p$ and obtain $m'''.$

7. We encrypt the $m'''$ using the public key of the first relay $R1_p$ and obtain the final message $m''''.$

8. We then sends $m''''$ to the first relay.

9. The first relay removes the last layer of encryption (that was encrypted using its public key) by decrypting it with its private/secret key $R1_s$ and obtains $m'''.$

10. The second relay removes the second last layer of encryption and sends the resulting message $m''$ to the third relay, which then removes the third last layer of encryption and sends the resulting message $m'$ to the destination (google).

11. Google then decrypts the message it received $m'$ and obtains the actual message $m.$

12. Server/google then processes the request and sends a response to the user and follows the same process.

    1. It sends the packet to $R3$ which encrypts the message with its private/secret key.

    2. $R3$ then sends it to $R2$ which encrypts the message with its private/secret key.

    3. $R2$ then sends it to $R1$ which finally routes the packet to the user.

13. The user then removes all the layers of encryption and views the final response.