TOR. Where would I be without it? TOR has helped me circumvent DNS issues and get around Google blocks more than once. I also use it in some of my programs/scripts. So here’s a simple PHP script that I use to switch TOR to a new identity.

Sidenote : In case you don’t know what TOR is, here are the important bits – it’s a free, volunteer-based netwok of anonymous proxies. There are three things I like about it – it’s free, it works, and it’s easy to switch to a new proxy chain – just get a “new identity”. No need to reconfigure your browser/whatever to use a new proxy address.

The PHP script itself is below, followed by an explanation on how to use it.

New Identity Script

/**
 * Switch TOR to a new identity.
 **/
function tor_new_identity($tor_ip='127.0.0.1', $control_port='9051', $auth_code=''){
 $fp = fsockopen($tor_ip, $control_port, $errno, $errstr, 30);
 if (!$fp) return false; //can't connect to the control port
 
 fputs($fp, "AUTHENTICATE $auth_code\r\n");
 $response = fread($fp, 1024);
 list($code, $text) = explode(' ', $response, 2);
 if ($code != '250') return false; //authentication failed
 
 //send the request to for new identity
 fputs($fp, "signal NEWNYM\r\n");
 $response = fread($fp, 1024);
 list($code, $text) = explode(' ', $response, 2);
 if ($code != '250') return false; //signal failed
 
 fclose($fp);
 return true;
}
 
/**
 * Load the TOR's "magic cookie" from a file and encode it in hexadecimal.
 **/
function tor_get_cookie($filename){
 $cookie = file_get_contents($filename);
 //convert the cookie to hexadecimal
 $hex = '';
 for ($i=0;$i<strlen($cookie);$i++){
  $h = dechex(ord($cookie[$i]));
  $hex .= str_pad($h, 2, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT);
 }
 return strtoupper($hex);
}

Basic Usage

tor_new_identity() takes three optional parameters –

• $tor_ip – The IP address of the TOR server you want to access. Defaults to 127.0.0.1
• $control_port – The TOR control port. Defaults to 9051.
• $auth_code – The authentication code. Defaults to an empty string. See the next section for more details on this parameter.

The function returns TRUE if it successfuly sent the “new identity” command, FALSE otherwise. If your TOR proxy doesn’t require authentication you can force a new identity very easily :

if (tor_new_identity('127.0.0.01', '9051')) {
 echo "Identity switched!";
}

TOR Authentication

Depending on your configuration, the script may need to authenticate before it can signal TOR to switch to a new identity.

There are three authentication modes TOR supports :

• None – no authentication required. You don’t need to set the third parameter of tor_new_identity().
• Cookie – TOR stores a “magic cookie” in the control_auth_cookie file inside it’s data directory. You have to authenticate by sending this cookie encoded in hexadecimal form. You can use tor_get_cookie() to read and properly encode the cookie.
  Example :

  $cookie = tor_get_cookie('/path/to/tor/data/dir/control_auth_cookie');
   tor_new_identity('127.0.0.1', 9051, $cookie);

• Password – your basic password authentication. To authenticate you will need to use the password in “quotes” or a hex-encoded version of the password.
  Example :

  tor_new_identity('127.0.0.1', '9051', '"secret_passw0rd"');

P.S.
Is this too dry? Add some milk. Reconciliation

注意了：要采用tor_new_identity方法前，必须要在Tor设定中的高级选项卡里，把验证设为“无”或者“密码(不要随机生成)”，然后重启Tor以应用新的验证策略。