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