How to Access .onion Sites (Also Known as Tor Hidden Services)

The website addresses that end with “.onion” are not like normal domain names, and you cannot access it with a normal web browser. The addresses that end in the point “.onion” are hidden services on the Deep Web. Many deep websites contain very unpleasant things, and many of them are probably scams or illegal. You should probably avoid freely navigating on .onion sites – instead, use it only if you have a specific site to which you want to access for a good reason.

What is a site .onion?

The sites that use the higher level field. Weon are confidentiality -focused websites that are only accessible with the TOR network.

TOR – “Abbreviation of the onion router” – is an anonymizing computer network. It is partially funded by the US government and is designed to help people in countries where Internet access can be censored or monitored. When you wrongly connect, your Internet activity is sent via the TOR network, anonymizing your Internet activity so that it cannot be spied and so that you can access websites that can be blocked in your country.

So when you access Google.com via Tor, your request bounces from Tor relay to the Tor relay before reaching an exit node. This output knot then contacts Google.com for you, and it returns the data with the data that Google has responded. Google sees it as the IP address of the exit node by contacting it instead of your IP address.

But that means that the “last mile” of traffic can be searched by a supervisory organization or even execute the exit nodes, especially if your traffic is not encrypted. A .onion address points to a Tor Hidden service, which is a server to which you can only access via TOR. This means that your navigation activity cannot be clocked by someone who looks at the Tor output nodes. It also means that someone hosting a website can hide this server using the TOR network, so that no one can find it – in theory.

For example, Proton, a company famous for its cloud -oriented services, keeps an onion address at “https://protonmailrmez3lotcpipstkleegetolb733firgj7r4o4vfu7ozyd.onion”.

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Facebook retains an official TOR hidden service address to “Facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjbiltxjqhy 3mb7kx5tfyd.onion”.

This allows you to access Facebook via Tor, and your connection never leaves it where it can be searched. This can be useful in countries that block Facebook, for example.

You do not necessarily want to use Tor all the time, because it is significantly slower than normal navigation, but it is a useful tool for anchoring your Internet activity and bypassing censorship.

How to access the sites .onion with the Tor browser

To access a .onion address, you will need to access it via the TOR browser. This is a modified version of Firefox configured to connect to the sites via the Tor network.

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Download the TOR browser to the TOR project website to continue. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.

The TOR project still does not offer any official TOR application for iPhone or iPad, but some third -party applications are available in the Apple App Store.

After launching the TOR browser, enter the address .onion in its address bar. For example, to access the hidden service of Proton, you would enter the following address:

https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7ozyd.onion

Or, to access the hidden service of the DuckDuckGo search engine, you would enter:

https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/

When using the TOR browser, you can click on links to addresses and they will normally take care. But they will only work in the Tor browser, when they are wrong.

Do not take on onion sites via proxies

You can also access the .onion sites without running Tor via proxys that are wrong for you. The proxy is wrongly connected for you, then transmits traffic on ordinary internet.

However, it’s a very bad idea! You lose anonymity that you normally have when you connect to a .onion site via the TOR browser. This is the whole point of an .onion address, after all. The website you access keeps anonymity, but someone who monitored your connection can see which website you are connecting to. The service provider can also see what you are logging in and try to snoop around all the information you can provide.

Tor2web works this way, but you shouldn’t use it unless you don’t know exactly what you do. Many sites will even offer you a security warning if you try to access it using this type of service.

Are you looking for lists of sites ?onion? Search on the web of .onion sites lists and you will find places to start. Many of the sites of sites are themselves stored on sites. Onion, to which you can only access through Tor.

Once again, beware: many sites. Weion contain very unpleasant things, and many of them are probably scams. We recommend that you stay away from them if possible. Try to avoid browsing the sites randomly. Use using TOR, and connect instead to specific sites you need or want to access.