Onion routing Vs Garlic routing:Networking concepts behind anonymous surfing on the web.

Routing is the process of selecting best paths in a network.This capability is supported by a routing device called a router.There are many other details about routing such as algorithms and protocols used after configuration.

Worried about Big online corporations getting information about your browsing habits?Here is a video on Ted-talks about filter bubbles and how it can affect you.This brings the question, how does a user cover their online tracks, and hide information about their online history and habits.This could be through Browser add-on or software.I will therefore take you through the IT Techniques used by the software's and add-on.

Onion routing was originally developed by US Navy, its made up of projects researching, designing, building, and analyzing anonymous communications systems. The focus is on practical systems for low-latency Internet-based connections that resist traffic analysis, eavesdropping, and other attacks both by outsiders (e.g. Internet routers) and insiders (Onion Routing servers themselves). Onion Routing prevents the transport medium from knowing who is communicating with whom -- the network knows only that communication is taking place. In addition, the content of the communication is hidden from eavesdroppers up to the point where the traffic leaves the OR network.(source)

Its generally free of charge to use, and runs on most operating systems.Onion Routing currently makes use of the Privoxy filter to reduce the threat of identifying information from a client reaching a server.The second generation Onion routing is called Tor, Open-source tool, connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system which addresses many flaws in the original onion routing design.It can be downloaded here

Onion routing is like an advanced form of proxy routing. Instead of routing through a single unprotected server, it uses a network of nodes that constantly encrypt your data packets at every step. Only at the end of this “chain” of onion nodes does your data become decrypted and sent to the final destination. In fact, only this “exit node” has the power to decrypt your message, so no other node can even see what you’re sending.
Due to the multiple layers of encryption, which not-so-coincidentally resemble the layers within an onion, it’s extremely difficult to trace your information back to you as the source when you use onion routing.

If you would like to know how to set up an anonymous website or server using tor read here as a computer user, you can be able to protect your browsing habits by doing this


Garlic routing:  is a variant of Onion routing that encrypts multiple messages together to make it more difficult for attackers to perform traffic analysis. To protect the identity of the sender, messages are encrypted multiple times with the public keys of selected nodes on the network. To be delivered the encrypted packets must be received by routers selected by the sender, in the order specified by the sender. Differently from Onion routing an encrypted packet ("onion") can contain multiple packets ("cloves") with different destinations, and the sender is not required to specify a return path for the message.source

Network Security starts with the user

We are in the process of approving our ICT policies and migrating to SUSE and one of the things I did prior , was to monitor within the test group their online and offline habits.I have come to the conclusion that most users have little or no regard to network security.Most people think that its the duty of the system administrator to come up with policies that protect them from network security downtime's.To some level, its true, but also there are little other things that users do, that could compromise the security of the network.

Its amazing how users tend to respond quickly to online pop ups of winning Free iphones and cockroaches moving on the screen without knowing what is really behind this pop ups.This could be phishing or spyware platforms that could could compromise any network.

One thing I have noted in the past is the reluctance of users to have strong passwords(This are passwords that are more that 8 letters, a mixture of both alphabetical letters,symbols and numbers). They have a tendency of submitting spouse, children and parents names, which can be easily guessed.Most password policies recommend password change after a certain period of time, its unfortunate most users have a problem changing passwords and tend to ask the systems admin to increase the expiry period.

Some users tend to be power users, meaning they can be able to install applications on their computers on their own.Its amazing you will get so many applications installed without the user knowing what they are for, worse still, their impact and space size.

My friend told me of how they would send embarrassing links to colleagues when one left their workstation without logging in.It would be great if this was deployed everywhere, due to the fact that most employees do not find the need to lock their workstations when they leave, this can adversely affect the privileges approved if a malicious person abused them  using your workstation and account.

I am advocate of open source platforms, and one thing I have learnt through using Linux SUSE is the ability to monitor the little things and come up with policies, access lists to match up to them, since the users at times do not care, or have no idea.

Have you used SUSE?Kindly share your thoughts on it.