Getting Tor onion routing + Chrome working
*** EDIT *** I used Google Chrome version 6.0.453.1 dev from their official yum repository, YMMV
I spent about an hour figuring this out tonight so I figured I'd send it along. Up until now I've never really gotten the combo of Tor, a browser and a proxy working to my liking. This is how I did it:
- Install Tor, get Vidalia if you can, this makes it a couple clicks to get going
- Install the Switchy! extension for Chrome
- Use Vidalia or whatever to start Tor, make sure the onion turns green
- Disable DNS pre-fetching in Chrome -> Options -> Under the Hood (ignore this if you don't care who sees the domains you are looking up)
- Restart Chrome (I couldn't get #4 to kick in without a restart)
- Configure a proxy in Switchy! I named mine "Tor", under "Manual Configuration" I filled in "127.0.0.1" and port "9050" as the SOCKS Host, click SOCKS v5, leave everything else blank and save
- Click the Switchy! icon and choose your new proxy, visit the Tor Project to confirm, you might have to wait a second after choosing a proxy for the settings to start working.
SOCKS v5 and v4a have the ability to forward DNS lookups but apparently the threading model in Chrome makes it difficult to catch and forward the prefetched DNS queries so you must disable that feature (source)
I've verified with wireshark that the DNS queries and all other browser traffic (HTTPS included) also go through the proxy.
