Using Tor Mirrors

Tor is an anonymizing software that bounces traffic via computers all around the world. It can provide access to regular sites on the internet or to hidden sites only available on the network.

The following Void Linux Mirrors are available on the Tor Network:

Using XBPS with Tor

XBPS can be made to connect to mirrors using Tor. These mirrors can be normal mirrors, via exit relays, or, for potentially greater anonymity, hidden service mirrors on the network.

XBPS respects the SOCKS_PROXY environment variable, which makes it easy to use via Tor.

Installing Tor

Tor is contained in the tor package.

After having installed Tor, you can start it as your own user:

$ tor

or enable its system service.

By default, Tor will act as a client and open a SOCKS5 proxy on TCP port 9050 on localhost.

Making XBPS connect via the SOCKS proxy

XBPS reads the SOCKS_PROXY environment variable and will use any proxy specified in it. By simply setting the variable to the address and port of the proxy opened by the Tor client, all XBPS's connections will go over the Tor network.

An example upgrading your system over Tor:

# export SOCKS_PROXY="socks5://127.0.0.1:9050" # xbps-install -Su

Using a hidden service mirror

To use a hidden service mirror, the default mirrors need to be overwritten with configuration files pointing to .onion-addresses that are used internally on the Tor network. XBPS allows overriding repository addresses under /etc/xbps.d.

Copy your repository files from /usr/share/xbps.d to /etc/xbps.d and replace the addresses with that of an onion service (Lysator's onion used as an example):

/etc/xbps.d/ # sed -i
's|https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org|http://lysator7eknrfl47rlyxvgeamrv7ucefgrrlhk7rouv3sna25asetwid.onion/pub/voidlinux|g'
/etc/xbps.d/*-repository-*.conf ```

Tor provides layered end-to-end encryption so HTTPS is not necessary.

When installing packages, with `SOCKS_PROXY` set like the earlier example,
XBPS should indicate that it is synchronizing the repositories from the
onion address specified in the override:

``` # xbps-install -S [*] Updating
`http://lysator7eknrfl47rlyxvgeamrv7ucefgrrlhk7rouv3sna25asetwid.onion/pub/voidlinux/current/aarch64/nonfree/aarch64-repodata'
...  aarch64-repodata: 4030B [avg rate: 54KB/s] [*] Updating
`http://lysator7eknrfl47rlyxvgeamrv7ucefgrrlhk7rouv3sna25asetwid.onion/pub/voidlinux/current/aarch64/aarch64-repodata'
...  aarch64-repodata: 1441KB [avg rate: 773KB/s] ```

### Security consideration

It is advisable to set `SOCKS_PROXY` automatically in your environment if
you are using an onion. If the setting is missing, a DNS query for the name
of the hidden service will leak to the configured DNS server.

To automatically set the environment variable, add it to a file in
`/etc/profile.d`:

``` # cat - <<EOF > /etc/profile.d/socksproxy.sh #!/bin/sh export
SOCKS_PROXY="socks5://127.0.0.1:9050" EOF ```