Orbot for Desktop/Linux

Privacy
1

Just wondering if anyone is aware of an Orbot-like app for desktop, particularly Linux? Something that routes all traffic through Tor?

I’m aware of Tor Browser and the Whonix and Tails distributions, but that’s not what I mean. You can probably just use the normal tor package to set up something like Orbot, but isnt there a friendlier way?

3

Unfortunately can’t find anything searching for “Tor”, “Onion” or “Orbot”… except the Tor Browser of course.

4

There is sadly not an easy singular way to route multiple apps or the entire system (where possible) through Tor.

You may find some shoddy scripts, but they often make changes in a “dirty” way that is prone to breakage and potential leaks.

If you use Firejail you can easily route specific programs through Tor by adding the following to a profiles .local:
eg. for Dino: ~/.config/firejail/dino.local

env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/torsocks/libtorsocks.so

you may need to correct the path depending on where your distro installs torsocks.

Disclosure: am past maintainer of firejail

6

https://tails.net/contribute/design/Tor_enforcement/

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as adding a line to a config file somewhere…

Still, it would be cool to create an applet for this, recreating what Tails is doing on a normal distro, with on/off switch.

7

So I found a few applications that aim to do this:

  • Anonsurf - for ParrotOS only (but also found in the testing repo of MX Linux); only one with a (minimal) GUI
  • torctl - for Arch only
  • torghost - abandoned