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I read an article (about that Tor underground raid)) in that articel they said that installing the Tor browser bundle could be dangerous as it acts also as an relay and that illegal data could be streamed by my PC.

But as far as I know the browser bundle only installs a new Firefox browser with Tor addon.

I talk about the offical bundle from there: https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en)

But now I feel a little unsafe...

Does anyone have more informations on this? And how can I make sure that there isn't a relay active?

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    Note that it's only exit nodes that are potentially dangerous. A normal relay will in no way endanger you (though both exit and normal relays are off by default).
    – user5
    Commented Nov 8, 2014 at 20:46
  • Thx for your reply. why is this not an danger ? And Looking at there tor relay / bridge bundles to they enable exit gateways bei default?
    – Boas Enkler
    Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 14:28
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    Because normal relays only relay encrypted traffic and do not exit to the wider internet (meaning if someone's doing something illegal it just passes through your computer encrypted; you can't see it, and anyone snooping on your connection can't see it). No bundle enables exiting by default (you have to manually configure an exit policy, which isn't something you could do by accident).
    – user5
    Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 15:30
  • Perfect many thanks that makes me feel quite better.
    – Boas Enkler
    Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 17:39
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    That's a bit misleading sounding, I agree, but it's exactly that: misleading. None of the current bundles are exit nodes by default. If you're that worried about it, download one, extract it, and look at the torrc configuration file. It will have a line that says something to the effect of: ExitPolicy reject *:*. As long as it has no accept lines, and only that reject line, you're fine. mroq's answer is correct: No browser bundle is an exit by default.
    – user5
    Commented Nov 10, 2014 at 13:37

1 Answer 1

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tor does not provide browser versions for any platform (be it windows or anything else) that have (exit) relays enabled by default. tor browser does not have an interface to enable or disable it either - your computer would need a direct connection to the internet too to be reachable by other nodes in the network, so it's all round unlikely for you to ever relay traffic for the tor network. tor is not a p2p application

however, if you are still unsure and want to check the configuration file that tor browser uses to connect to the network, check the file torrc and torrc-defaults located in tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/ - you should see client related entries, but nothing at all relating to (exit) relaying.

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  • Many thanks for your answer ! I checked it and there were only client entries. Is there also a second way to absolutely ensure no relay or bridge is running? For example which process should run if a tor relay is active? Second Should a Tor Relay / Bridge always have a torrc so that i could scan for that? As From this news i feally really disturbed to have a hidden relais running.
    – Boas Enkler
    Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 14:22
  • @BoasEnkler howtogeek.com/howto/28609/… - you can check what ports tor is listening on. it should only be 9150/9151
    – mroq
    Commented Nov 10, 2014 at 19:57

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