I was thinking about how safe it really is to use Tor as a "local proxy" to grab information from webpages anonymously. Is it possible that the real IP address can be seen?
On the official Tor homepage they claim:
Tor does not protect all of your computer's Internet traffic when you run it. Tor only protects your applications that are properly configured to send their Internet traffic through Tor. To avoid problems with Tor configuration, we strongly recommend you use the Tor Browser Bundle. It is pre-configured to protect your privacy and anonymity on the web as long as you're browsing with the Tor Browser itself. Almost any other web browser configuration is likely to be unsafe to use with Tor.
The Tor Browser will block browser plugins such as Flash, RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others: they can be manipulated into revealing your IP address. Similarly, we do not recommend installing additional addons or plugins into the Tor Browser, as these may bypass Tor or otherwise harm your anonymity and privacy.
Is this something of concern for me when I run the script below (with Vidalia/Tor enabled)? Would my real IP be revealed if I ran the script on different webpages? The webpage in the code below (my-ip.heroku.com) is very simple and only returns my IP address. But how exposed would I be for example on webpages with browser plugins such as flash, realplayer, quicktime etc.?
import socket
import socks
import http.client
def connectTor():
socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5 , "127.0.0.1", 9050, True)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
def main():
connectTor()
print("Connected to Tor")
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("my-ip.heroku.com")
conn.request("GET", "/")
response = conn.getresponse()
print(response.read())
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
check.torproject.org
instead ofmy-ip.heroku.com
.