How does a basic Tor network work ?
Encryption can protect the content of your digital file, but not the route, destination or location. More often than not traffic analysis gives away most of these pieces of information.
How does traffic analysis work?
Internet data packets have two parts: a data payload and a header used for routing. The data payload is whatever is being sent, whether that's an email message, a web page, or an audio file. Even if the payload is encrypted, traffic analysis still reveals a great deal about what you're doing and, possibly, what you're saying. That's because it focuses on the header, which discloses source, destination, size, timing, and so on.
That's where anonymous networks like TOR have become so popular - because they erase the path of the content delivery by creating a series of hard to follow twisted relay route from source to destination where no one observer at a single point can deduce where the data came from and where its going.
These relay routes are set by a connection of networked computers enabled with TOR nodes - which are connected to multiple directory servers within the TOR network. These directory servers not only create contact points between two computers on the TOR network, they also connect a machine on a TOR network to another one with the same Node. The clients on the TOR network encrypt the content of the delivery files, and while traffic analysis can figure the source and destination of one journey point between receiver and sender, it gets increasingly difficult when the whole journey is divided into multiple receivers and senders with the path between each being erased after each transaction.
The user's software or client incrementally builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the network. The circuit is extended one hop at a time, and each relay along the way knows only which relay gave it data and which relay it is giving data to. No individual relay ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each hop along the circuit to ensure that each hop can't trace these connections as they pass through.
As the clamour for privacy makes many of us seek features of the dark web, it would be interesting to see whether in the future, these kind of networks become more and more mainstream.
If the Penguins of Madagascar created a Tor network between them, then visually this is how it would kind of look like
