Sharing files securely is always a open discussion topic. Somehow the relationship between security/privacy and usability stand in the opposite sides. But, OnionShare managed to create a bridge between them. It is a tool written by Micah Lee which helps to share files of any size securely and anonymously using Tor.

In the rest of the post I will talk about how you can this tool in your daily life.

How to install OnionShare?

OnionShare is a Python application and already packaged for most of the Linux distributions. If you are using Windows or Mac OS X, then visit the homepage of the application, and you can find the download links there.

On Fedora, you can just install it using dnf command.

sudo dnf install onionshare -y

For Ubuntu, use the ppa repository from Micah.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:micahflee/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install onionshare

How to use the tool?

When you start the tool, it will first try to connect to the Tor network. After a successful connection, it will have a window open where you can select a number of files, and then click on Start sharing button. The tool will take some time to create a random onion URL, which you can then pass to the person who is going to download the files using the Tor Browser.

You can mark any download to stop after the first download (using the settings menu). Because the tool is using Tor, it can punch through standard NAT. Means you can share files from directly your laptop or home desktop. One can still access the files using the Tor Browser.

Because of the nature of Tor, the whole connection is end to end encrypted. This also makes the sharer and downloader anonymous, but you have to make sure that you are sharing the download URL in a secure way (for example, you can share it using Signal). OnionShare also has a rate-limit so that an attacker can not do many attempts to guess the full download URL.