Tor Android

This is native Android TorService built on the Tor shared library built for Android. The included libtor.so binaries can also be used directly as a tor daemon.

Currently, Tor Android is built with the following versions of tor, libevent, openssl, zlib and zstd:

Component	Version
tor	0.4.9.6
libevent	2.1.12
OpenSSL	3.5.5
zlib	1.3.2
zstd	1.5.7

Tor Android binaries are available on the Guardian Project Maven Repo

First add the repo to your top level Gradle file:

allprojects {
    repositories {
        // ...
        maven { uri("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/guardianproject/gpmaven/master") }
    }
}

Or, for groovy's build.gradle

allprojects {
    repositories {
        // ...
        maven { url "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/guardianproject/gpmaven/master" }
    }
}

Then add the tor-android and jtorctl dependencies to your project:

dependencies {
    implementation("info.guardianproject:tor-android:0.4.9.6")
    implementation("info.guardianproject:jtorctl:0.4.5.7")
}

Apps using tor-android need to declare the INTERNET permission in their Android Manifest file:

    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>

Tor protects your privacy on the internet by hiding the connection between your Internet address and the services you use. We believe Tor is reasonably secure, but please ensure you read the instructions and configure it properly. Learn more at https://torproject.org/

Minimum Requirements

In order to use tor-android you need to target Android API 24 or higher.

It runs on the following hardware architectures:

• arm64-v8a
• armeabi-v7a
• x86
• x86_64

Tor Frequently Asked Questions:

• https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/faq
• https://support.torproject.org/faq/

Building tor-android

Please see: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/guardianproject/tor-android/master/BUILD.md

tor-android is generally built on Linux, but it can also be built on macOS

This can be built reproducibly using the included Vagrant VM setup. That will run with either libvirt or VirtualBox. The provisioning is based on the "release" job in .gitlab-ci.yml.

Building on Debian

These instructions are for building tor-android on a Debian based system.

First install the prerequisite packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install autoconf \
    autogen \
    automake \
    autopoint \
    autotools-dev \
    gettext-base \
    gettext \
    git \
    libtool \
    make \
    patch \
    pkg-config \
    g++ \
    uidmap \
    libseccomp-dev \
    libscrypt-dev \
    build-essential \
    ca-certificates \
    po4a \
    libzstd-dev
sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

(NOTE: see instructions for building Tor on Debian for a starting point on the latest Debian dependencies used to build tor...)

You'll need a valid JDK setup on your system. An extremely easy way to obtain a correclty configured one is to install SDKMAN. With SDKMAN installed, you can obtain and use Java 25 like so:

sdk init 
sdk install java 25.0.2-tem
sdk use java 25.0.2-tem

Then obtain the Android SDK and NDK. The Android SDK is installed by default with Android Studio, and the NDK can be downloaded from within Android Studio's SDK manager.

for now, tor-android is built with NDK toolchain 28.2.13676358

Then set these environment variables for the SDK and NDK:

export ANDROID_HOME=~/Android/Sdk
export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=~/Android/Sdk/ndk/28.2.13676358

Be sure that you have every git submodule up-to-date:

./tor-droid-make.sh fetch -c

To build, run:

# make a universal tor-android library for every supported architecture
./tor-droid-make.sh build 
# make a tor-android library for particular architectures from: arm64-v8a armeabi-v7a x86 x86_64

# 64 bit ARM APK, for running on devices
./tor-droid-make.sh build -a arm64-v8a

# 64 bit Intel APK, for running on emulators with Intel hosts
./tor-droid-make build -a x86_64 

This will produce an unsigned tor-android AAR.

(NOTE: that ./tor-droidmake build ... does not currently work in the fish shell, use zsh or bash...)

Preparing for a release

Top-level build.gradle.kts

Update these fields at the top of build.gradle.kts. For example, for a release of tor 0.4.9.5 the first digits of versionCode and the versionName string are the version of tor used.

Note that versionCode ends in a 0.

    versionCode = 49050
    versionName = "0.4.9.5"

If you are making new releases of tor-android that don't include a new update of tor, change the last digit of versionCode and add a field onto versionName, ie:

    versionCode = 49051
    versionName = "0.4.9.5.1"

README.md

Update the versions of the dependencies in the table, as well as the field which contains copy+paste instructions on how to add tor-android to a Gradle project.

gradle.properties

Update VERSION_NAME to the version of tor used in this build, ie VERSION_NAME=0.4.9.5

sampletorapp/build.gradle.kts

Update the version of tor-android used in the sample app's Gradle configuration.

Publishing tor-android

Once you build the binaries, you can use Gradle tasks to publish this in various ways, if you have the right credentials

Publish to your local Maven repository: ./gradlew publishToMavenLocal

Publish to GitHub packages: ./gradlew publishReleasePublicationToGitHubPackagesRepository

Publish to Gradle Central: ./gradlew publishAggregationToCentralPortal