How to block local ports and get a working Tor version

Question

I've been trying to block torrent downloading on a mac computer using WaterRoof. I create rules that block ports 1025-65535 except 9150 which is the Tor control port, If I'm correct, but Tor Browser opens say either that Tor unexpectedly crashes or that it could not connect to Tor control port. I used the activity monitor to see which port it's trying to use and most of the times it says something like this localhost:50172 localhost:9150. Why is Tor reaching to other ports first and then 9150? I even selected ports 80,440 as the only ports that my firewall allows but nothing. Can anyone help me?

Update: I fixed the issue. It turns out that I selected IP as protocol when I was making the rule in WaterRoof. I chose UDP and now Tor is working fine. Weird thing though is that I cannot connect to the Internet from normal web browsers. I tested the rule on my Macbook but no problems there. Any thoughts on this?

Answer 1

I think a better rule set would be:
Allow all localhost:*
Block <whatever>
That should let Tor work.

The reason Tor would have started working again when you set it to UDP instead of IP is that Tor uses TCP, not UDP. While it's true that most torrenting is done using UDP I think it is possible to use TCP with some clients, so you probably want to have the rule as IP.

It may be having trouble connecting to the internet using regular browsers because the regular browser is using UDP for some purpose and you've inadvertently blocked it. For instance DNS is typically done over UDP (port 53).