Using my work computer

Hi,

I apologize for the inconvenience if this is already covered somewhere, but Google won't come up with anything and the forum search function says my search terms are too common (I'm not sure how else to word the search).

I intend to use TOR on my work computer at the office, but all of our computers are being monitored. Unfortunately, I am not too savvy on the subject and I have no idea what kind of monitoring they have in place. I know they can at least see browsing history on everyone's computers, as someone else had gotten in trouble before on google searching something.

I was wondering, will using the TOR bundle as-is make it safe for me to browse? Or is there any additional setup I need to perform to make it safe to browse anonymously? And if so, what are those steps and where can I find a tutorial/instructions for setup? Thank you so much for your patience and your help!

have no idea what kind of monitoring they have in place.

What if they make screenshots of your desktop every X minutes?

If you are sure that monitoring is performed somewhere else, and no spyware installed on your computer, than any kind of SSL-connection would work. VPN, ssh-tunnel to some server outside your office network or even https:// to destiation website.

The only thing you should care about is SSL-certificate verification because cert can be replaced on-the-fly with fake one issued by traffic monitoring tool. (mitmproxy, tcpcacther, SSLStrip, Fiddler2 and others do this trick).

What comes to Tor, I haven't heard about tools that can monitor Tor traffic. I'm not 100% sure this is impossible, but at least very nontrivial, since Tor makes 'onioned' SSL connections and only 'outer' layer is visible to your network admin. So I feel using Tor Bundle in your situation is pretty much safe.

To be blunt, this strikes me as a bad idea. Unless the computer itself is trustworthy (i.e. for sure not spying on you) then there's no guarantee Tor will help you, and in fact may only make you look more like you're up to no good. If you could justify using your own laptop at work, then you would only need to worry about your network traffic being monitored and Tor will definitely provide protection in that regard.