Luser's Guides

SFTP OVER TOR TUTORIAL

Greetings, luser. If you are here, it is because you do not know how to connect to SFTP servers through the Tor network. Don't worry, we have all been there, but we eventually RTFM and grew out of that phase. Fortunately for you, we have written a more digested guide to spoonfeed you on how to stop being such a noob.

GNU/Linux

  1. Download tor (preferably the standalone Tor package, not the Tor Browser, even though it appears to work as well) using your distro's package manager of choice (like apt, dnf, pacman, Portage...). You may also compile it from source, or download it from their website if you are using a shit distro without Tor in its repos. Most distros will include torsocks within the tor package, but if yours doesn't, you should install it as well, even though it may not be necessary, depending on the client you want to use.
  2. Download a SFTP client of your choice. sftp is a nice CLI-based SFTP client, which is probably included with the default installation of your distro (and if it doesn't, you know what to do). Filezilla is a GUI-based SFTP client that supports SOCKS5 connections, which means you won't need to use torsocks. Unless you are an elitist (and you probably shouldn't be, if you are reading this guide out of need), both are valid.

Now, here is where stuff varies, depending on whether you want to use sftp or Filezilla.

sftp

Just run:

$ torify sftp luser@whateverthefuck.onion

Congratulations on losing your virginity. For further information, as well as other possible methods, an answer to the reason you have to relog every 10 minutes, and paranoia fuel, read the fucking manual.

Filezilla

Filezilla has a built-in SOCKS5 proxy connection mode. The exact implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader, but generally speaking, you probably won't give a fuck about the minutiae, unless you are really not a LARPer (in which case, you should be reading the official Tor documentation instead).

The following is shamelessly ripped off from the official Tor documentation on how to configure Filezilla to use Tor (yes, there is documentation for that. Isn't reading the fucking manual great?) for your spoonfeeding pleasure. Here comes the plane:

  1. Run the `tor` command in your shell. Leave it running in the background. If you are going to use it very often, you could configure it as a service. No, I'm not going to explain that in this guide.
  2. 2. Click the 'Edit' button in the toolbar and select 'Settings...'
  3. On the left-side menu, click the 'FTP' header. Uncheck the 'Fall back to other transfer mode on failure' box.
  4. On the left-side menu, select 'Generic proxy'.
  5. Select the Socks5 radio button. Enter the following settings:
    Proxy host: 127.0.0.1
    Proxy port: 9050
    Proxy user:
    Proxy password:
  6. Click the 'Passive Mode' header. Click the button beside 'Use the servers external IP address instead'.
  7. I seriously hope I don't have to tell you to do this in order for you to actually do this, but click the fucking "OK" button.

Beware: if Tor Browser is the source of your Tor connection, the port will be 9150. Needless to say, we taught you better than to use the Tor Browser proxy host.

Not so lusers beware as well: some distros offer different defaults on the way different Tor ports handle connections. NixOS, for example, is one of these distros. It is recommended you check out your distro's docs on Tor, just in case, to avoid any surprises.

Windows

  1. Install GNU/Linux.

Well, okay, you won't actually install GNU/Linux, won't you? Here are some pointers for you, Windows luser. It is up to you to demonstrate you are actually not that much of a shazbot and that you can do some research (like, for example, reading the GNU/Linux steps described above and putting two and two together).