Free Tool
Tor Circuit Visualizer
Tor protects your privacy by bouncing your traffic through three relays — a guard, a middle relay and an exit relay — each wrapped in its own layer of encryption. Click each relay below to see exactly what it knows about you and what it cannot see, and why that separation matters.
An educational diagram, not Tor itself. This page simulates a circuit in your browser so you can learn how onion routing works. It does not connect to the Tor network, and nothing here makes you anonymous.
What this tool does
Tor is a network of volunteer-run relays that forwards your internet traffic in layers, like an onion. Your computer picks three relays at random and encrypts your request once for each of them. Each relay peels off one layer as the request passes through, and only learns what that layer tells it. No single relay ever knows both who you are and where you are going.
This visualizer lets you explore that idea hands-on. The diagram shows the five points in a circuit: you, the guard relay, the middle relay, the exit relay and the website you are visiting. Click any of them to see what it can observe — your IP address, the destination, the content of your request — and what stays hidden from it. A second panel walks through the three encryption layers and shows how each one is removed in turn.
The tool is built for beginners. You do not need to know any cryptography to use it: every click explains itself in plain English, and the guide linked below covers the same ideas in more depth, including the honest limits of what Tor can and cannot do.
Try it
Click a point in the circuit to see what it knows. Then peel the layers one at a time.
Start here. Click any point in the circuit above to see what it can — and cannot — observe.
Peel the onion
Your request is wrapped in three layers of encryption before it leaves your computer. Click each layer to peel it away.
Three layers wrapped. The guard relay can only remove the outermost layer; the middle relay the next; the exit relay the last. No relay can see through a layer meant for another relay.
How it works
Before your request leaves your computer, your Tor software wraps it in three layers of encryption — one for each relay in the circuit. The outermost layer can only be opened by the guard relay, the next by the middle relay and the innermost by the exit relay. That is where the onion analogy comes from: each relay peels exactly one layer and passes the rest on.
The guard relay is the only relay that sees your real IP address, because it is the first hop and you connect to it directly. But it cannot see where your traffic is going, because the destination is still hidden inside the two remaining layers. The middle relay sees neither end: it receives traffic from the guard and passes it to the exit, knowing neither your address nor the destination. The exit relay sees the destination and the request itself, but it does not know who sent it — the request arrives from the middle relay, not from you.
Circuits are rebuilt regularly, roughly every ten minutes, so a single set of relays does not watch all of your browsing. And the whole design depends on encryption between you and the website too: if the site uses HTTPS, the exit relay can see which site you visit but not the contents of your pages; without HTTPS, the exit relay can see the content as well. That is why the guide stresses HTTPS even when using Tor.
Limitations
This visualizer is a teaching diagram, not a measurement. It shows the design of a Tor circuit, not what any real circuit is doing right now, and it cannot tell you whether a real circuit is safe. Tor itself has real limits that this page does not hide: the exit relay can see unencrypted traffic, websites can block Tor exit relays, Tor is slower than a direct connection, and an attacker who can watch both ends of a circuit can attempt traffic-correlation analysis. None of that makes Tor useless, but it means Tor is not a guarantee of anonymity — no tool is.
- The diagram uses fixed, fictional relay names; real relays are chosen at random from thousands of volunteers.
- Clicking a relay shows what that relay knows in the standard design; a relay run by a malicious operator could log what it sees, which is exactly why the design limits what each one can see.
- The page does not connect to the Tor network and does not download or run Tor Browser.
Examples
Example 1 — visiting a news site. You open a news site over Tor. The guard relay sees your IP address but not the news site. The middle relay sees neither. The exit relay sees the news site but not your IP address. The news site sees a request coming from the exit relay, not from you. If the site uses HTTPS, nobody in the circuit can read the article you are reading.
Example 2 — what the guard relay cannot do. Suppose the guard relay is run by someone curious about your browsing. They can see that you use Tor and how much data you send, but they cannot see which sites you visit, because that information is encrypted in layers they cannot open. That is the whole point of the design: the relay that knows who you are is kept blind to where you go.
Example 3 — why HTTPS still matters. You visit a site that does not use HTTPS. The exit relay now sees the full contents of your request — the pages, the form data, everything. Tor hid who you are from the site and hid the site from your internet provider, but the exit relay is the weak point for unencrypted traffic. Always look for HTTPS, even over Tor.
Frequently asked questions
Does Tor make me completely anonymous?
No. Tor makes it much harder to connect your browsing to your identity, but it is not a guarantee. The exit relay can see unencrypted traffic, websites can block Tor, and an observer watching both ends of a circuit can attempt correlation analysis. Treat Tor as a strong privacy tool with known limits, not as invisibility.
Why does Tor use three relays and not one?
So that no single relay knows both who you are and where you are going. The guard knows who you are but not the destination; the exit knows the destination but not who you are; the middle knows neither. One relay would know both, and a single point of trust would defeat the design.
What is the guard relay?
The guard is the first relay in your circuit and the only one that sees your real IP address. Tor keeps the same guard for weeks or months on purpose, because changing it often would give more relays a chance to see your address over time.
Can my internet provider see that I use Tor?
Yes. Your provider can see that you connect to a Tor guard relay, though it cannot see which sites you visit through it. That is usually legal in most countries, but it is visible — Tor hides your destination, not the fact that you use Tor.
Where do I get Tor Browser safely?
Only from the Tor Project's own website, torproject.org. Never download it from mirrors or app stores you cannot verify, and check the download's signature file (.asc) when you can. Our Tor education hub explains the safe download path.