Proxies! your online anonymity

Posted by : Unknown Sunday, 21 October 2012

when ever you visit a website,or use any web service,your IP address is logged onto their servers.and what is an IP address?

IP Address(wiki):

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing.

What happens if they have my IP Address?

Having an IP address of a victim can lead to disastrous results.one can easily gain access to your computer by just knowing your IP address (unless you are also as smart as a hacker).I'm gonna discuss about it in detail in my coming posts.
An IP address can be used to trace your Current location.To test it,visit http://whatismyipaddress.com/ And you can get some(only public)details regarding your network,where as a person in govt field can know many more detail like ur browsing history,even read the mails you've sent over your internet connection.
It even can be used to sniff your data if you are using public Wifi points

Proxies:

A proxy server is a intermediate server used to conceal your identity.before going to that,lets see what happens over a normal internet connection,

internet communication mechanism illustration

In a normal network connection,when ever you type in a particular web address,the the request is sent to the particular server via your router,which responds to your request by sending related data back to you.

for example if you try to access google,what happens can be represented as below

ok,now lets get into proxies without wasting any more time,

while using a proxie server,all your requests will be sent to an intermediate proxies server which in turn forwards them to respective servers and receives the data from them and forwards it back to you.In the above process,the server will only get a request from proxy server so,it won't have any log of your IP Address.sounds confusing?ok,take a look at the below diagram so that you can understand it better.

In the above network,bob (server) don't know that Alice (client) requested time, bob thinks Proxy has requested the time,so it returns time to Proxy which sends it back to Alice.

Advantages:

It can be used to conceal your online Identity.
It can be used to access blocked websites
It can be used to bypass firewalls (commonly used in colleges,schools,offices etc)
Infact,most of the hackers relay on proxies for what ever they do.

Most Important: you can access facebook,youtube etc in your school computers which are generally blocked .yaa, i can see that excitement blooming in you ;)

Some of the online proxies are:

Get a complete list of about 200 working online proxies
Just go to one of the above sites,and in the URL box,enter the URL of the site(Address of the blocked site) you want to visit.For example,consider www.maskip.info,

you can also download VPN's (Virtual private Networks) which can be used as proxies.some of the free VPN are:

Though,the above methods can't completely ensure your anonimity especiall,when you don't want to be tracked by Govt officials,because,the proxy server you use saves your logs,so when enquired can lead directly to you.so,to overcome this problem,Onion Routing is employed.

Onion Routing:

What actually happens in onion routing is,the outgoing request is sent to a proxy server,which again sends it to another proxy server,so on the chain continues up to many proxy servers and finally reach the required server.the primary proxy is switched after every definite time period.so,here non of the servers know exactly where the request is from.all the knew is,the ip of previous proxy and the next server where the request is to be sent.as the primary proxy is switched frequently,even it can't be used to trace out the client,promising you a complete anonymous circle.you can understand it better by taking a look at the below pic: