I am interested in using tor on a Arm based processor laptop is there a way to do this?

Question

Could I use QEMU on my Arm processor based laptop and put tails inside QEMU. Will this setup work? How do I do this?

Is there any other way I can use tor on Arm based processor?

Answer 1

Tor should work fine on ARM CPUs.

On distributions like Debian there are Tor versions for arm, arm64, armel, armhf (even mips, mipsel and powerpc). The Tor Project themselves also distribute debian packages for armhf and armel.

Fedora (and likely other redhat derivatives) also distributes a [Tor package for armv7hl.

ArchLinux for ARM similarly package Tor for arm, armv6 and armv7.

It's likely many other distributions do too.

If your chosen distribution don't package it for your specific ARM CPU, or at all, you could alternatively build Tor from source:

wget https://dist.torproject.org/tor-0.2.9.8.tar.gz{,.asc}
gpg --recv-key 7A02B3521DC75C542BA015456AFEE6D49E92B601 # Ensure the fingerprint matches
gpg --verify tor-0.2.9.8.tar.gz{.asc,} # ensure it is verified properly
tar vxaf tor-0.2.9.8.tar.gz
cd tor-0.2.9.8/
./configure && make && sudo make install

Building it from source will require ensuring you've all the required build tools and dependencies available too.

There is also work being done on porting Tails to ARM and Tor Browser to ARM.

Answer 2

Tor works pretty fine on ARM - I'm running my nodes on ARM SBC's myself. You need to compile it by hand and OpenSSL and Libevent to avoid perfomance loss. If you need specific instructions - just say it!

Answer 3

Tor works on arm linux perfectly fine.

Tor Browser, nor TAILS works on ARM as of this time.

https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/ARM_platforms/

TAILS states they don't have the resources nor pre-req's such as TOR on arm.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12631

TOR ticket tracker for porting to ARM hasn't had much traction at all.

I wouldn't expect either of these projects to be ported to arm anytime soon.