Pi Access Point
Just as the modem router supplied by your ISP provides a wireless network by acting as an access point, you can use a Raspberry Pi to build a wireless network by acting as an access point. You may want to do this because:
- You want an extra layer of security between your modem router and the rest of your devices that use the internet
- You want to route traffic through Tor for devices that do not have a Tor browser
Building an acces point
There is an excellent tutorial on adafruit.com on building a Pi access point.
IMPORTANT: Theses instruction are for Raspbian Jessie. They do NOT work with Raspbian Stretch.
It uses these packages:
- hostapd (this handles the access point)
- isc-dhcp-server (this provides the DNS service)
- iptables-persistent (this manages rules for the built-in firewall)
It uses these configuration files:
- /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf
- /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server
- /etc/network/interfaces
- /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
- /etc/default/hostapd
- /etc/init.d/hostapd
- /etc/sysctl.conf
- /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
- /etc/iptables/rules.v4
Building a Tor access point
If you want to route your internet traffic through Tor but either don't want to or can't install a Tor browser on every device that uses the internet, you could create a Pi access point that also routes internet traffic to Tor.
Note: there are some websites that refuse to accept traffic that comes through Tor. You may therefore wish to have one device that does not use the Tor access point to access these or remember to change the wireless network a device uses to the Tor access point for secure private browsing.
There is an excellent tutorial on adafruit.com on building a Pi Tor access point. This builds upon the tutorial for building the Pi access point.
IMPORTANT: Theses instruction are for Raspbian Jessie. They do NOT work with Raspbian Stretch.
IMPORTANT: use this line to save the ip rules
sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4"
It uses these additional packages:
- tor (this handles routing internet traffic through Tor nodes)
It uses these additional configuration files:
- /etc/tor/torrc
- /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
- /etc/iptables.ipv4.na
- /var/log/tor/notices.log
- /var/log/tor/notices.log
Raspbian Jessie
Raspbian Jessie can still be downloaded from this Raspbian Jessie torrent file