This information is controversial, and some consider the use of bittorrent over TOR to be counter to the goals of the TOR project. This article does not seek to answer the questions about the validity of any protocol over the TOR network but merely how to do it. Also, be aware that the BT protocol itself my reveal a nodes real IP. Be informed about the technologies you use.

To use Bittorrent with The Onion Skin Router (a project sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and previously funded by the Naval Research Lab), first, download and install The Onion Skin Router. You can download The Onion Skin Router from the following URL:

http://tor.eff.org/download.html (cache)

TOR is what makes your bittorrent traffic anonymous, TOR is a client that joins your system to the TOR anonymous network. This network is not a collection of proxies, its a low latency mix network, with SSL/TLS tunnels telescoped inside one another. This means that each system you route your traffic through can not see your traffic, or your IP address. If you want to understand how it does this, read The Onion Skin Router Wiki page for more information. Once you have The Onion Skin Router installed, and running, you can move on to the next step.

Install TOR client

The official installation instructions for TOR are available on the EFF TOR website:

http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-win32.html (cache)

Install Proxy Chains

Then, you need to download ProxyChains (cache). Unfortunately, this is currently only available for UNIX systems. If you are running Windows, you will want to use something other than TOR to use bittorrent anonymously, such as i2p or, you will want to use another bittorrent client that supports TOR natively. Currently, the official bittorrent client does not support TOR natively, but in the following section, we list clients that do. Or, as mentioned, you can use i2p to use bittorrent anonymously. Instructions for using i2p to make bittorrent anonymous are on the i2p wiki page.

Once ProxyChains? is installed, just add

socks5 127.0.0.1 9050
http localhost 8118

to the ProxyChains? config file at ~/.proxychains/proxychains.conf. Now that it is configured, type proxychains btdownloadcurses at the command line. Remember this, you must invoke proxychains to execute the bittorrent client for you. Do not start your bittorrent client without this if it does not support TOR natively and you have no configured it to do so!

List of clients that supports TOR natively

1. Azureus Bittorrent client

Download the Azureus Bittorrent client (cache) Instructions to configure this client to use TOR (cache)

Install Privoxy

This will help to ensure that your browser does not send information of its own accord to a website you want to visit anonymously. Like TOR, privoxy is an open source project, so no spyware or hidden code in this application and you don't have to take our word for it, you can always check the source code yourself and compile from that trusted source if you prefer.

Download privoxy from here:

http://www.privoxy.org/ (cache)

If you installed TOR, privoxy and followed the instructions for configuring your client, you should be all set. Finally, please donate to the TOR project: http://tor.eff.org/donate.html.en