OnionShare: share your files in a safe and anonymous way

Without a doubt, most of the readers of this blog know about Tor or have heard of it, Well this is a web browser concerned with user privacy and for this reason it has become one of the best known and most used browsers for these purposes.

Another thing that characterizes Tor is the use of its network known for .onion links which can only be accessed through Tor services. The use of this type of service is usually very useful when wanting to gain more privacy, which is why today we are going to talk about an application that is based on these services.

About OnionShare

OnionShare is an application that gives us the ability to share files of any size safely and anonymously. It works by starting a web server, which makes it accessible as a Tor service, and generates an indecipherable URL to access and download the files.

Does not require the creation of a separate server or the use of a third-party file-sharing service.

you guys host the files on their own computer and use a Tor service to make it temporarily accessible over the internet. The receiving user only needs to open the URL in Tor browser to download the file.

Onionshare it works by creating a temporary web address ".onion" that you can share with a friend. When you're done, stop sharing and the address no longer works.

OnionShare has drag and drop option for files and folders, so you can easily send or download them with a couple of mouse clicks.

There is no particular size limit for sharing or downloading files and folders, and you can also share any number of files / folders at once.

Once you have started this application, it will automatically copy the shared URL to the clipboard and automatically close it after the operation is finished.

How to install OnionShare on Linux?

Si want to install this application on their computers, they must open a terminal and run the commands for your Linux distribution that you are using.

For those who are users of Ubuntu or some derivative of it, we must add a repository to the system, we do this with this command:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:micahflee/ppa

Once this is done, we must update our list with:

sudo apt update

And finally we must install the application with:

sudo apt install onionshare

In the case of those who are Fedora users or Distributions based on this install the application with:

sudo dnf install onionshare

Si are Arch Linux, Manjaro users or derivatives thereof, there is a PKBUILD available in AUR, so to install the application we must have it enabled in our pacman.conf file.

We install OnionShare with:

pacaur -S onionshare

For The rest of the Linux distributions must download the source code of the application and perform the compilation.

Si are users of Debian or Debian-based systems we must install some dependencies first:

sudo apt install -y build-essential fakeroot python3-all python3-stdeb dh-python python3-flask python3-stem python3-pyqt5 python-nautilus python3-pytest tor obfs4proxy

Now we must download the source code we do this by typing:

git clone https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare.git

cd onionshare

Y we can build the deb package for our system with:

./install/build_deb.sh

Or if you prefer, you can launch the application with:

./dev_scripts/onionshare

If you want the application to run with a user interface:

./dev_scripts/onionshare-gui

With this, the application must be opened, its interface is quite intuitive. Tor services must be running in order to use OnionShare.

Upon selecting the file they want to share or even a folder along with all its content inside, the application will immediately provide them with a URL which they can share.

In the same way, it is important to remember that if you want the greatest discretion, use an encryption system to share your links.