Onion Circuits displays information about the current Tor circuits and connections.

To open Onion Circuits, click on the Tor status icon ( or ) in the top-right corner and choose Open Onion Circuits.

Understanding Tor circuits

If Tails is already connected to the Tor network, a list of Tor circuits appears in the left pane of Onion Circuits.

When you connect to a destination server, for example, when visiting a website, the connection appears in the list below the circuit it uses.

Click on a circuit to display the technical details about each relay in the right pane.

Each Tor circuit is made of 3 Tor relays. In the example above, the connection to tails.net goes through the 3 relays drk, kicka, and Quetzalcoatl.

1. The first relay, here drk, is called the entry guard.

   If you configured a Tor bridge, your bridge is your entry guard.

   The entry guard is the same for all circuits, as a way of protecting against end-to-end correlation attacks.

   But, your entry guard changes every time you restart Tails.

   To keep the same entry guard across different Tails sessions, use a bridge.

2. The second relay, here kicka, is called the middle relay.

3. The third relay, here Quetzalcoatl, is called the exit node.

Closing and replacing a Tor circuit

You can close a given Tor circuit to help replace a particularly slow Tor circuit or troubleshoot issues on the Tor network. To do so:

1. Right-click (on Mac, click with two fingers) on the circuit that you want to close.

2. Choose Close this circuit in the shortcut menu.

   When you close a circuit that is being used by an application, your application gets disconnected from this destination service.

   For example, when you close a circuit while Tor Browser is downloading a file, the download fails.

3. If you connect to the same destination server again, Tor uses a different circuit to replace the circuit that you closed.

   For example, if you download the same file again, Tor uses a new circuit.