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Running TOR on Kali | The proper way

·112 words·1 min

TOR shouldn’t be run as root. Many guides gloss over this by removing the root check in the start-tor-browser.desktop file, here is the better way:

  • Create a new user:
    • adduser --home-dir /home/kali kali
  • Download and extract TOR from https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
  • Add the newly created user to the xhost file:
    • xhost si:localuser:kali
  • Copy the extracted TOR files to the home directory for the new user
  • Change the permissions for the TOR files:
    • sudo chown -R /home/kali
  • Run TOR with the command:
    • sudo -u kali -H /home/kali/start-tor-browser.desktop
  • Verify TOR is being run with the new user account by running:
    • ps aux | grep /tor

Now TOR can be run by an account without root permissions

Joshua Robbins
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Joshua Robbins
I write about the things I’m building, learning, breaking and fixing across Computer Science and Cyber Security.