Configuring TOR with Python

Mask Your IP Address using a Python Script

If you ever built a web scrapper then you must have faced the issue of being blocked by web servers for generating too many requests, or you Just wanted to hide your Real IP Address and automate your scripts.

In this article, I will explain how to configure TOR on your Linux System and How to implement TOR in a Python script to Mask your Real IP and Bypass IP Based Restrictions.

Photo by RealToughCandy.com

What is TOR?

For Those who are new to Hacking and Programming “Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication”. Tor network is a secure, encrypted protocol that can ensure privacy for data and communications on the web.

The Tor service/browser works by using a technology known as onion routing. The onion router is a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network that enables users to browse the internet anonymously. Onion routing uses multiple layers of encryption to conceal both the source and destination of information sent over the network.

The TOR Network is usually accessed using the TOR Browser, but what if you wanted to use it in your Python Scripts and run Automation scripts over the TOR Network? That's exactly what we are going to do today!!

Tor installation

The installation of Tor depends on your system and is detailed on the official website. For Most Debian Based systems this will work.

sudo apt-get install tor

To launch Tor, run:

sudo service tor start

To check if it works, simply run the following command from a terminal:

curl --socks5 localhost:9050 --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 -s https://check.torproject.org/ | cat | grep -m 1 Congratulations | xargs

If everything works fine You will get this output.

Congratulations. This browser is configured to use Tor.

Configuring with Python

Python Requests Module will be used to send Requests over TOR Network.

sudo pip3 install requests
sudo pip3 install requests[socks]
sudo pip3 install requests[security]
sudo pip3 install cryptography

We can now use to requests module.

import requests

You can check your IP address without Tor with the command:

requests.get('https://ident.me').text

The Output will be your Original IP Address.

To Use the TOR network inside Python Scripts we first need to tell python to use a Proxy.

proxies = {
    'http': 'socks5://127.0.0.1:9050',
    'https': 'socks5://127.0.0.1:9050'
}

Now, you should have a new IP address with:

requests.get('https://ident.me', proxies=proxies).text

Getting New Identity

We need to get New IP address every time we make a new request or at fixed time intervals, For this, we need a Python Module called “Stem”.

The stem is a Python controller library for Tor. With it, you can use Tor’s control protocol to script against the Tor process.

For more anonymity, we can generate a new User Agent for Every request using the “Fake UserAgent” Module. Both of these modules Can be Installed using pip.

sudo pip3 install stem
sudo pip3 install fake_useragent

The Tor controller must also be configured to request identity renewal.

sudo nano /etc/tor/torrc

Save the following lines in the /etc/tor/torrc file.

ControlPort 9051
CookieAuthentication 1

Then we restart Tor to take into account these modifications:

sudo service tor restart

Packing it all in a Script

We now have everything ready all we need to do is to pack these things in a Script.

First of all, we need to import the needed modules.

After importing the modules we define our proxy.

Now we will define a Handler for our Stem Controller. Using this handler we will Authenticate our Requests and Generate Signals to get a New IP address.

Here is the Full Code

This code will generate a New IP Address every 10 seconds with a fresh User Agent in every Request.

Use Cases for this Tool

There are many Scenarios in which this can be used, it can be used as a base to create many amazing tools to solve problems like

• Scraping Normal Web Without Getting Blocked
• Making a Dark Web Scraper
• Tool to Mask IP Address
• And Many More…..

Thanks a lot for reading. Share if you like it 😇😇

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