Orbot: An Anonymous Proxy for Android using Tor

[Eugen Leitl <eugen@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://openideals.com/2009/10/22/orbot-proxy/

Orbot: An Anonymous Proxy for Android using Tor

Posted in Announcing..., Emerging Tech, Guardian, Mobile Mobile - Comments -
October 22, 2009

Tags: android, guardianphone, proxies, tor

I’d like to make this post without much fanfare. Just looking to share
information on the work I’ve been doing with the fantastically radical team
over at the Tor Project, as part of my work on the Guardian Project. We have
successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android
application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make
it useful to end users…. secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on
Android is now a reality. (Update: Tor doesn’t magically encrypt all of your
Internet activities, though. You should understand what Tor does and does not
do for you.)

However, there is still much work to be done… read on!

1) Tor 0.2.2.5-alpha release contains all the necessary code for building the
Tor binary exe using the Android C SDK. I utilized
http://github.com/tmurakam/droid-wrapper toolchain wrapper scripts to make
life easier. This will produce the output Tor exe that can run on Android w/o
needing root.

Update: Thanks to Jake, you can now read the updated Orbot BUILD doc for the
step by step build how to.


(thanks to ioerror for the pic)

At this point, we are pretty convinced that the performance and efficiency of
the C binary is quite significantly better than the Java-based ports of Tor
running within Dalvik… this translate to a better experience for the user,
with no noticeable increase in battery drain or lag on the rest of the device
while Tor is running in the background.

2) Orbot – this is the new Android app which bundles the Tor binary, handles
its proper installation on the device and then provides a gui for
starting/stopping, view the log and torrc, etc. It also provides a built-in
HTTP Proxy and is licensed under the Tor license.

home.jpgtor-on.jpglog.jpg

Just to be clear – we aren’t using the NDK or a shared library… we are
actually extracting a binary and managing it via Runtime.getRuntime().exec()
calls. This is 100% supported – who knew?! More info on how to do this here

The first code is up here… all is working, but def needs much polish:
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/android/trunk/Orbot/

This post is in part a call for developers to contribute to the continued
development of Orbot, so we can get it to a 1.0 state. The other big task is
to modify the open-source, privacy focused Shadow browser, from the
University of Cambridge DTG group, in order to make it work with our HTTP
proxy. That would be a really great step forward, as right now, we have to
ask users to set their global APN (read:
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/android/trunk/Orbot/INSTALL)

Thanks for everyone’s help and support to get here. I’d like to keep pushing
on to a public release via the App Market very soon. Let me know if you’d
like to contribute in any way – code, screen designs, icons, testing….

Domo arigato, Mr. Orbot-o!!


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