Running Orchid

To start the Orchid SOCKS5 proxy, perform the following:

java -jar orchid-version.jar

Orchid will first attempt to establish a connection to the Tor network and gather directory information. Once it has enough directory information it will begin building circuits.

Using Orchid to browse over Tor

To test Orchid, you can tell your browser to use Orchid as a proxy - however it is important to note that Orchid + your browser isn't a secure replacement for the Tor Browser bundle, which has many other enhancements beyond Tor. For example, with Firefox, by default, DNS lookups are not sent over a configured SOCKS5 proxy. You can change this potentially de-anonymizing default configuration by going to the URL about:config and setting the property network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true (this is already done in the Tor Browser).

Using the dashboard

Orchid includes a "dashboard" feature to observe information about the internal state of Tor. To start the dashboard, set the following property when the JAR is run:

java -Dcom.subgraph.orchid.dashboard.port=10000 orchid-version.jar

To access the dashboard, just connect to the port (10000) with netcat.

Using Orchid as a library

The Orchid Tor client exposes a SocketFactory that can be used within a JVM application. More detailed documentation and code examples are coming very soon.