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Is using the Tor network to visit the web pages in public wifi secure or not since Tor will help to make us anonymous (hide the metadata such as URLs) and HTTPS helps us to protect the content.

Will Tor and HTTPS requests together help to secure our browsing?

schroeder
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Sivaram Rasathurai
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Keep in mind that Tor provides anonymity, but not necessarily security. For example, say that the government where you live has banned parsnips for being too vulgar, and anyone caught even looking at them online is thrown into jail. But you still like reading about parsnips, but you don't want the government to know that you're a deviant for fear of being incarcerated. This is where Tor is an excellent option, since it by design makes is extremely difficult to locate who's the original sender of any traffic. An adversary might see that someone on Tor is looking at parsnips, or that you're using Tor, but not both (unless they can see both your exit and entry relays and do a correlation attack but that's highly unlikely).

However, say that you want to do your online banking, and you don't quite trust the WiFi you're connected to. There's no reason to hide that you want to do online banking, so you don't need anonymity, and HTTPS can be broken in various ways by anybody forwarding the traffic, so here you're introducing more risk by using Tor, since suddenly 3 more unknown entities have access to your traffic. So here a commercial VPN might be a better option, since you a) know who's handling your traffic, and b) it's a single entity.

The worst combination would be to use Tor for both traffic that requires anonymity and traffic that doesn't. Continuing my example above, using Tor to both look at forbidden parsnips, as well as to do your online banking, at the same time would be very risky, since you need to identify yourself to do banking, and any leak from that application suddenly identifies the Tor user.

So, it's best to use Tor only when you really need it, and preferably only with services that don't require identification.

forest
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Stuggi
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Tor is a secure program or in another word it connects a machine to the anonymity network securely on whichever network is used be it a public WiFi, organization's WiFi or home WiFi. If it is not blocked you can expect same level of anonymity everywhere, until you do few things which reveal your identity on the public web but never on your local network.