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 title: Anonymize Your cURL Requests Using Tor
 date: 2011-12-09 12:00:00
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**Note: This post assumes that you already have Tor installed and
configured on your server. If not, visit the Tor Project Homepage
[0] for instructions on how to set it up.**

I love writing web crawlers and data aggregators in PHP. They say
knowledge is power, and I find it exciting to write applications
that allow you to gather up as much knowledge as possible.
Sometimes, though, you want to gather your data without revealing
your identity to your target. This can be for both good and bad
reasons, but let’s assume it is for a good reason that you need to
keep hidden. The Tor Project is a great way to accomplish this
task. Tor allows you to anonymously browse the web, and you can
configure the applications on your computer to run through the Tor
network. The PHP script below outlines the process it takes to
randomly refresh your IP address on Tor, and then run a cURL
request through your local Tor proxy, providing a unique identity
and anonymity every time you run the script.

For this particular example, I am sending a request to
icanhazip.com [1] to demonstrate the changing IP address. If you
have a greater understanding of cURL, there are many more steps
that can be taken to mask your identity as well, but I won’t go
into that here.

```php
<?php

// connect to local tor proxy and refresh ip address
$ip = '127.0.0.1';
$port = '9051';
$auth = 'PASSWORD';
$command = 'signal NEWNYM';

$fp = fsockopen($ip,$port,$error_number,$err_string,10);

if(!$fp) {
    echo "ERROR: $error_number : $err_string";
    return false;
}

fwrite($fp,"AUTHENTICATE \"".$auth."\"\n");
$received = fread($fp,512);
fwrite($fp,$command."\n");
$received = fread($fp,512);

fclose($fp);

// submit curl request through tor proxy at 127.0.0.1:9050
$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://icanhazip.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "127.0.0.1:9050");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_SOCKS5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

// do something with the response
```

---
[0]: https://www.torproject.org/
[1]: http://icanhazip.com//
---


EOF