The Tor Project's new Oniux tool protects all your Linux apps from snoopers

The Tor Project is best known for developing the Tor Browser, but it does develop some lesser known privacy apps as well. The organization has now announced a new product called Oniux, a new tool that lets you run any Linux program through Tor at the kernel level, significantly boosting privacy.

With Oniux, you may no longer need to worry about misconfigured proxy settings as it puts apps into their own Linux namespace, a kernel feature for isolating system resources, to route it through Tor, eliminating the possibility of potential data leaks. The Tor Project said this might be useful for anyone from activists to researchers who need network isolation.

Oniux is quite similar to another tool developed by the Tor Project called Torsocks. Oniux aims to overcome some of the limitations in Torsocks such as working on all applications, instead of just those that make system calls through libc. Oniux also makes it impossible for malicious apps to leak data via system calls through raw assembly.

If you’re on Linux and want to try out Oniux you can do that already with the following instructions, first you will need to install Rust on your system as Oniux is built using Rust:

• curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Next up, you need to install Oniux with this command:

• cargo install --git https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/oniux [email protected]

Here are some examples of how to use Oniux (don't type the $ when writing commands):

# Perform a simple HTTPS query using oniux!
$ oniux curl https://icanhazip.com

 

# oniux also supports IPv6 of course!
$ oniux curl -6 https://ipv6.icanhazip.com

 

# Tor without onion services is like a car without an engine ...
$ oniux curl http://2gzyxa5ihm7nsggfxnu52rck2vv4rvmdlkiu3zzui5du4xyclen53wid.onion/index.html

 

# You can also enable logging if you are a nerd. 🤓
$ RUST_LOG=debug oniux curl https://icanhazip.com

 

# If you want, you can "torify" your entire shell, isolating all processes within!
$ oniux bash

 

# If you are in a desktop environment, you can isolate graphical applications too!
$ oniux hexchat

While Oniux certainly holds notable advantages over Torsocks, it is much newer and considered experimental, while Torsocks is much more tested, being 15 years old. With that said, the Tor Project doesn’t want this to discourage you from using it and it says it aims to continue working on it to make it better.

Source

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