- doc
- advanced topics
- Accessing resources on the local network
The term "local network" refers to the set of computers and devices that can be reached directly from your computer without going through the Internet.
For example, your home router, your network printer, or
the intranet of your company are usually on your
local network, also called LAN for Local Area Network. In technical
terms, this refers to the set of IP addresses defined in
RFC1918, like IP addresses that start
with 192.168
.
Security considerations
Accessing resources on the local network can be useful in the context of Tails, for example to exchange documents with someone on the same local network without going through the Internet.
But an application that can connect to both resources on the Internet (going through Tor) and resources on the local network (without going through Tor) can deanonymize you.
This page describes some of the security measures built in Tails to protect from such attacks and explains how to access some types of resources on the local network.
Connections made to the local network are not anonymous and do not go through Tor.
Browsing web pages on the local network
It is impossible to access web pages on the local network using Tor Browser. This prevents websites on the Internet from deanonymizing you using the content of other web pages that might be specific to your local network and reveal where you are.
To access web pages on the local network, use the Unsafe Browser instead.
Downloading files from web pages on the local network
To download files from web pages on the local network, you can use the
curl
command instead. For example, to download a document available on
the local network at http://192.168.1.40/document.pdf
execute the following command:
curl http://192.168.1.40/document.pdf