Usability of Anonymous Web Browsing: An Examination of Tor Interfaces and Deployability

Tor is a popular privacy tool designed to help achieve online anonymity by anonymising web traffic. Employing cognitive walkthrough as the primary method, this paper evaluates four competing methods of deploying Tor clients, and a number of software tools designed to be used in conjunction with Tor: Vidalia, Privoxy, Torbutton, and FoxyProxy. It also considers the standalone anonymous browser TorPark. The authors' results show that none of the deployment options are fully satisfactory from a usability perspective, but they offer suggestions on how to incorporate the best aspects of each tool.