What is The Onion Router?
Tor stands for The Onion Router — a network that hides who you are by wrapping your traffic in layers of encryption. Here’s how onion routing works, and how to run it across your whole network.
The Onion Router — better known as Tor — is a global network that hides who you are online by wrapping your traffic in layers of encryption and bouncing it through several volunteer-run relays before it reaches its destination. The name is the metaphor: like an onion, your data is encrypted in layers, and each relay peels away just one layer, learning only where to send the packet next and nothing about its origin or final contents.
Why it’s called “onion” routing
When you load a page over Tor, your device wraps the request in three layers of encryption and sends it through a randomly chosen path of three relays:
- The guard (entry) relay sees your IP address, but not what you’re requesting.
- The middle relay sees neither your address nor your destination — only the relays on either side of it.
- The exit relay sees the destination, but not who you are.
No single relay ever knows both who you are and what you’re doing. That separation is what makes onion routing fundamentally different from a proxy or a single-hop VPN, where one server sees everything.
Tor stands for The Onion Router. “Onion routing” is the technique; the Tor network is the largest live implementation of it, run by thousands of volunteer relays worldwide.
What onion routing protects — and what it doesn’t
Onion routing hides your IP address and your location from the sites you visit, and hides what you’re doing from your internet provider. It does not, on its own, protect you if you log into accounts that identify you, or if the software on your computer leaks data outside the Tor connection. That last gap — leaks from the device itself — is exactly where a hardware Tor router changes the picture.
Running the onion router in software vs. hardware
Most people first meet Tor through the Tor Browser, which routes only that browser’s traffic. Everything else on your machine — apps, updates, background services — still travels the normal, identifiable route. Configuring your whole system to use Tor by hand is possible but easy to get dangerously wrong.
A hardware onion router solves this by moving Tor off your computer entirely and onto a dedicated device that sits between you and the internet. Every device on the network — laptop, phone, tablet, IoT gadget — is routed through Tor automatically, with an always-on kill switch that blocks traffic the moment the Tor circuit drops, so nothing ever leaks in the clear.
THOR: the onion router, in a box
THOR is a pre-configured hardware implementation of the onion router. It runs Tor on open-source OpenWRT firmware, ships fully tested, and needs no setup — you plug it in and every connected device is on Tor. If you’ve been searching for “the onion router” hoping to actually use it network-wide rather than read about it, this is the plug-and-play version. Learn how Tor compares to a VPN, or see how a hardware Tor router works.
Skip the setup. Plug in and disappear.
THOR ships pre-configured and tested · $199.99 · free worldwide shipping.