I’ve always had a vague idea of what Tor was — something to do with anonymity, something associated (fairly or not) with the “dark web,” a tool journalists and privacy researchers namedrop. What I didn’t actually understand was how it works under the hood. So I spent some time digging in, and it turned out to be one of those rare pieces of internet infrastructure that’s both genuinely clever and much simpler than its reputation suggests.
Here’s what I learned — and, since I ended up building it directly into one of my own apps, how I put it to use.
What Tor Actually Is
Tor stands for “The Onion Router.” It’s a free, open-source network run by The Tor Project, a nonprofit that’s been maintaining it for over two decades. The core idea: instead of your device connecting straight to a website, your connection gets bounced through a chain of volunteer-run computers (called relays) scattered around the world before it ever reaches its destination.
That’s the whole premise. The genius is in exactly how that bouncing happens.
The Three Hops: Entry, Middle, Exit
Every time you connect to something over Tor, your traffic doesn’t take one hop — it takes three, through what’s called a circuit:
- Entry (guard) relay — the first hop. This one knows your real IP address — who you are — but has no idea what site you’re trying to reach.
- Middle relay — the second hop. This one knows literally nothing except “traffic came from relay A and needs to go to relay C.” It can’t see your identity or your destination.
- Exit relay — the last hop. This one talks to the actual website on your behalf, so it knows the destination — but it has no idea who originally sent the request.
That’s the actual privacy property, and it’s worth sitting with: no single relay in the chain ever knows both who you are and what you’re doing. Not because they’re trustworthy — because the system is designed so it’s structurally impossible for any one of them to have both pieces at once.
The Onion Part: Layered Encryption
Ever wonder why it’s called “The Onion Router” and not something forgettable like “The Layered Router”? Because whoever named it understood marketing. Peel back one layer of an onion and there’s another one waiting underneath — same deal here, except instead of making you cry by the time you reach the middle, it’s just making sure nobody in the chain ever sees the whole picture at once.
Before your traffic ever leaves your device, it gets wrapped in three layers of encryption — one for each relay in the circuit.
Each relay can only peel off its own layer:
- The entry relay peels off the outermost layer. That layer tells it “send this to the middle relay” — and nothing else. What’s left is still encrypted.
- The middle relay peels off the next layer. It learns “send this to the exit relay” — still nothing about content or origin.
- The exit relay peels off the final layer, revealing the actual request, and sends it out to the real website.
Each relay only ever sees enough to pass the parcel to the next hop — never the whole picture. The website on the other end sees the request coming from the exit relay’s IP address, not yours.
How a Circuit Gets Built
None of this is manual — when Tor starts up, it automatically:
- Downloads a directory of currently available relays (thousands of them, run by volunteers — individuals, universities, privacy organizations — all over the world)
- Picks three of them for a circuit: a guard, a middle, and an exit
- Negotiates that layered encryption with each one, hop by hop, before any real traffic flows
A circuit typically stays alive for about ten minutes before Tor rotates to a fresh one — so even if you’re browsing for a while, you’re not stuck on the same three relays forever.
Why It’s Slower (On Purpose)
This is the part people run into first and complain about: Tor is noticeably slower than a normal connection. That’s not a bug — it’s the direct cost of the three-hop design. Your data is taking a longer, more roundabout path, encrypted and decrypted at every stop, often through relays with limited volunteer-funded bandwidth. Speed and this level of anonymity are fundamentally in tension, and Tor deliberately picks anonymity.
What People Actually Use It For
The “dark web” association is real but wildly overstated relative to actual usage. In practice, the everyday reasons people reach for Tor are a lot more mundane:
- Journalists and their sources communicating without exposing who’s talking to whom
- Researchers and ordinary people who’d rather their browsing not be tied directly back to their home IP address
- People in countries with heavy internet censorship or surveillance, getting around blocks
- Anyone traveling who wants to reach a service the way they normally would from home, without a random hotel or airport network coloring how they’re seen
Where FFmpeg Commander Comes In
I build FFmpeg Commander, an app for downloading, converting, and editing video on your own machine. One recurring headache users ran into: trying to download a publicly available video — say, from a national broadcaster’s own site — and getting blocked because the site only allows connections from IP addresses inside that country. Even when the content is 100% legitimate to access, a normal home internet connection from the “wrong” country gets an instant no.
Once I understood how Tor’s relay system actually works, the fix clicked into place: if a download gets blocked for exactly that reason, the app can now automatically retry the request routed through a Tor relay that happens to be sitting in the right country. No separate app to install, no account to create, no manual setup — it’s built directly in. It only kicks in for that one specific situation (a location-based block), and it’s honest with you when Tor genuinely can’t help — a locked-down or paywalled video is a different problem entirely, and no amount of relay-hopping fixes that.
It’s a small feature next to everything else the app does, but it’s one of my favorites — mostly because building it meant actually learning how the thing works, instead of just knowing the word “Tor” and vaguely nodding along.
Tor and the Onion Logo are trademarks of The Tor Project. This post is my own account of learning how the network works — I’m not affiliated with the Tor Project.