IP Obfuscating software

February 24, 2006 9:50 AM

Which is the best IP obfuscating software available ?
posted by inquisitive to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Well, it depends on what you want it for. The program that (IMO) would best preserve your anonymitity is Tor. It routes your traffic through a random series of Tor servers, each hop is anonymous and encrypted. This makes it virtually impossible for the recipient to know who the sender is. This works well for low-bandwidth items like web surfing or telnet sessions and the like. I haven't tried it with high bandwidth programs (torrent, file transfer), but i don't think it's meant to scale for those types of applications. When i used it in the past, it was a pain to setup, i'm not sure if it's gotten any better since then.
posted by escher at 9:58 AM on February 24, 2006

I once had to route around a dumb corporate firewall that was blocking my own sites, and I found a few utilities that would piggyback on public proxy servers, some even could grab a new IP every 30 seconds.

Your IP is still sent with your communication, but it's some random computer in Poland or Spain or Brazil that almost certainly can't be traced back to you.
posted by mathowie at 10:09 AM on February 24, 2006

Response by poster: mathowie, can you tell me how to do it ?

I need to hide my IP address and change it to some random IP address.
posted by inquisitive at 10:22 AM on February 24, 2006

Response by poster: escher, What could be the problem in using Tor on a high bandwidth connection ?
posted by inquisitive at 10:34 AM on February 24, 2006

If you just want to hide your IP from the site you're visiting then JAP is another alternative.

It offers a service that isn't as safe as TOR but is better than using a random open proxy, while being fairly easy to use.

It's a good way to protect your privacy as long as you're not doing anything that could be illegal in Germany, since the German government can mandate back doors.
posted by Olli at 10:40 AM on February 24, 2006

Tor is not that hard to set up on Mac OS X (it's a bit more of a pain in the ass on Linux. Don't know about Windows). It will very effectively mask your IP from almost everyone (at least with web traffic -- it takes some work on your part for other stuff).

It's slow as molasses, and using tor for stuff like Bittorrent is expressly forbidden, and will get you banned.

The onion routers that make up tor are run by volunteers, and they can't afford the stupendous traffic that warez folks want to flood them with, so that heir copyright violations are untraceable.
posted by teece at 10:40 AM on February 24, 2006

It's slow as molasses, and using tor for stuff like Bittorrent is expressly forbidden, and will get you banned.

If tor is truly anonymous (i.e. even those running tor routers can't identify you), then it's impossible to ban someone... because you can't identify them. Now, tor routers probably can identify bittorrent traffic (and the end of a tor chain certainly can), and I assume that most tor routers block this sort of behavior... but it's by protocol, not by user.

The reason for this is simple: bittorrent involves a lot of traffic, and the tor network just isn't large enough to move that many bits around.

It is possible to use Tor to anonymize the traffic between you and a torrent tracker, while not tor-routing the P-2-P traffic itself. This sort of setup does not place a huge burden on the tor system. See This howto for details.
posted by toxic at 10:50 AM on February 24, 2006

Response by poster: Ok. Guys, can you give me some solutions other than Tor ? Also, if I want to hide my IP or spoof it - only for specific websites, is it possible ?
posted by inquisitive at 11:19 AM on February 24, 2006

I have no tech knowlwedge whatsoever and thus just about any proxy changes presents me with problems or difficulties. I use http://www.anonymizer.com/help/anonymous_surfing/1.5/ though. ILt costs a littlemoney but what I like about it is that I can click it on and off with ease. When on, it masks my ISP. I know this because there are two sites that bar me from comments but when I use the anon thing, my comments are accepted. This is probably a very simple anon thing and does not encrypt but then it serves my simple needs. For more sophisticated stuff, Tor, I have been told is good for all things but keeping out NSA.
posted by Postroad at 11:43 AM on February 24, 2006

There's The Cloak which is free for anonymous surfing. I believe also that Gmail strips off your IP from mail.
posted by Neiltupper at 11:55 AM on February 24, 2006

Check out the 'Security Now!' podcast. They covered this recently. The host talked about a project funded by the EFF called TOR (The Onion Router) that will do this.
posted by Wild_Eep at 12:11 PM on February 24, 2006

dang, that'll teach me to be trigger-happy on the comments.
posted by Wild_Eep at 12:12 PM on February 24, 2006

Ban is the language I have read from Azureus, it's not mine, toxic.

I don't care how they'd implement it -- the people donating their bandwidth to tor can't handle BT data traffic, and have specifically requested you not do that.
posted by teece at 1:58 PM on February 24, 2006

Forgive me if this is obvious to everyone reading this thread, including the requestor. But be aware that software alone cannot hide your IP address. You will need some sort of proxy or relay to direct your traffic through. Tor is one such service, anonymizer.com is another.
posted by Nelson at 3:17 PM on February 24, 2006

You can use a Proxy Auto Configuration file, e.g.

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
url = url.toLowerCase();
host = host.toLowerCase();

if(dnsDomainIs(host,".website1.org")) return "PROXY 123.123.123.123:80";
if(dnsDomainIs(host,".website2.org")) return "PROXY 123.123.123.123:80";
else return "DIRECT";
}

Save it as proxy.pac, and then configure your browser to use it

And then replace 123.123.123.123 with a proxy from the proxy list.

You can do the same thing with Tor (which is also a proxy).
posted by Sharcho at 11:34 PM on February 24, 2006