How does connecting to a hidden service over tor work?

Question

I’ve heard it explained a million times but it never clicked. Perhaps it’s the cryptography part im struggling with. It’s pretty easy for me to get overwhelmed by the technical terms.

To be clear, im talking about how a client running the tor browser manages to anonymously connect to a .onion webserver.

In: 34

Answer 1

Accessing normal web sites over tor takes your traffic through three hops so it’s hard to track you. A .onion server chooses a number of intermediary tor nodes as middlemen and connects to those over three hops. In total it then takes six hops to connect from a tor client to a .onion server through one of the intermediary nodes keeping both sides anonymous.