Tor check

If this page says Tor exit detected, websites see you arriving from the Tor network; the exit's address, not yours, is shown at the top of the homepage. If it does not, your traffic is not leaving through a known exit — either Tor is not in use, or you are using a bridge or a private exit not in the public list.

The last relay in a Tor circuit, which makes the actual connection to the website. Its address is public by design, which is what lets sites — and this page — recognize Tor traffic.

Most of the roughly 7,000 Tor relays only pass encrypted traffic between other relays; only exits connect to the open internet. Being a relay operator does not make an address an exit, and relays that are not exits are not flagged here.

Enter an address to check it against the current exit list; the result shows when the list was last fetched. The list changes constantly as exits come and go, so an address that was an exit yesterday may not be one today.

Tor Browser builds a circuit through three volunteer-run relays. Your traffic is encrypted in layers, one per relay; each relay removes one layer and learns only the previous and next hop, so no single relay knows both who you are and where you are going. The exit relay sees the destination (and the content, unless it is HTTPS); the entry relay sees your address. Because exits are public, sites can block or challenge them, which is why Tor users see more captchas than VPN users.

The layered encryption scheme Tor is named for: the client wraps the message in three layers of encryption, and each relay peels one off — like an onion.