How to contribute on github anonymously via Tor?

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None of these answers give a full useable workflow, I want to git push, not send an email! Here’s how to do it properly but there’s a bit of setup required. Instructions are for OSX

Publishing anonymously to github with tor+ssh

  1. Download tor browser bundle AND the tor command line proxy

     brew install tor
 brew cask install torbrowser

    1.1 In tor browser, Create a new email address ( I used hmamail).

    1.2 In tor browser, Create a new github account

  2. Create a new ssh key, only for tor with your new email address

    ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "satoshi_2@hmamail.com"

    2.1. Give it a name like: ~/.ssh/private_tor_rsa

    2.2. In github, go to SSH and PGP keys and add a new SSH key, make title memorable.

    2.3. In github, set Key to the public key you’ve just createdclip < ~/.ssh/private_tor_rsa.pub

  3. In github, create an empty repository, let’s call it ByteCoin, don’t initialise it with a readme.

  4. Edit the ssh config file ~/.ssh/config (create if it doesn’t exist)

    Host github-tor-alias
User git
HostName github.com
IdentitiesOnly yes
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/tor_only_rsa
ProxyCommand nc -X 5 -x 127.0.0.1:9050 %h %p

    You’ve created a hostname called github-tor-alias and tells ssh to use a proxy on localhost:9050 and use the tor_only_rsa key to authenticate.

  5. Setup the config for your new project to use the tor proxy and credentials.

    mkdir secret-project
cd secret-project
git init

git config --add user.name satoshi_2
git config --add user.email staoshi_2@hmamail.com

This next line is bloody important

5.1. note the ssh://git and github-tor-alias 

    git remote add origin ssh://git@github-tor-alias/staoshi_2/ByteCoin.git

  1. Remember how you installed the tor command line proxy? start it as a service. It listens on localhost:9050 

    brew services start tor

  2. Are you ready? Try pushing to github:

    git push origin master

Did it work? Go and double check everything, have I missed something? please edit this answer!

Congratulations

breath that free air and get creating!

So what have we just done? we’ve created a new identity who is associated only with the tor network, as far as github.com is concerned, you are staoshi_2 and could be anywhere in the world.

tor runs a proxy on 127.0.0.1:9050, because we setup a ProxyCommand in the ~/.ssh/config file, all of your traffic goes through the tor proxy, git uses your new ssh key because you added IdentityFile and IdentitiesOnly to your ~/.ssh/config file.

Powerful stuff.

Let’s double check that you’re really anonymous

  1. stop tor and try to git push again, it had better fail!

    ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

    8.1. If that git push succeeded well guess what, you weren’t using tor, github.com knows your IP, figure out how to get it working and then start again with a new email address.

9. Happy freedom!

anon.

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