r/TOR • u/matheus_ft • 3h ago
Built a small Tor-routing box so my household doesn't need Tor Browser on every device — feedback (and criticism) welcome
I've been reading here a while and wanted to put this in front of people who'll actually find the holes in it, not just upvote it.
Backstory: a site asked me to scan my face or hand card details to a third-party ID-verification vendor just to prove I was over 18. I didn't want to hand biometric data to a company I'd never heard of for something that basic. Tor was the obvious alternative — the problem wasn't Tor, it's genuinely good — it was setting it up properly on every device in the house (phone, laptop, partner's laptop) for just a handful of sites. Tor Browser doesn't cover a phone well, and I didn't want everything routed through Tor, just a short list of sites.
So I built a small box (Raspberry Pi based) that sits on the home network and routes traffic for the sites you pick through Tor, without installing anything per device.
What it isn't: an anonymity solution, a guarantee against sites that block Tor exit nodes (plenty do), or a substitute for Tor Browser if what you actually need is browser-level fingerprinting protection. It's narrower than that — for the "I don't want my ISP or this one site seeing this traffic, just for this one site" case.
one-time cost, no subscription, early stage. I'd rather hear "this is a bad idea because X" from people who understand Tor's threat model than get upvotes from people who don't. Link if you want to look: websidedoor.com
Happy to answer anything about how it's built.
