[PenTest] Stay anonymous using Nipe

Cleber J Santos
2 min readFeb 28, 2021

Read this article in portuguese: https://cleberjsantos.medium.com/pentest-navegue-an%C3%B4nimo-com-o-nipe-796c2bfea49b

If you’ve surfed using the TOR networking throengh a web browser as Brave, or TOR navigator, you know that anonymity is one of the most important elements for the penetration tester.

Tools can be used in order to hide the user’s identity from being exposed. Some examples that we can mention of tools to guard their identity as: VPN (Virtual Private Network), Proxyservers and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

But, in this article, i’ll tell you one the best tools to hide yourself completely from the internet and go anonymous using Tor network, and all of that, using any web browser.

Nipe is a open source tool written in perl language which enables the Tor network as a user’s default gateway, the script routes all the system traffic through Tor network, which enables users to surf the internet offering some level of privacy and anonumity.

It should be noted that, when using a tool for privacy and anonymity, masking the IP address alone will not offer anonymity, as DNS information may still be available. Both IP and DNS information must be masked.

The script is easily available on Github for cloning, but, play atention, Nipe is not installabel as some tools, so, open a terminal and change directories o the Desktop or any directory of yout choice, this directory will be the installation location.

# Download
$ git clone https://github.com/htrgouvea/nipe && cd nipe

# Install libs and dependencies
$ sudo cpan install Try::Tiny Config::Simple JSON

# Nipe must be run as root
$ sudo perl nipe.pl install

Done! Now we can use some commands:

COMMAND          FUNCTION
install Install dependencies
start Start routing
stop Stop routing
restart Restart the Nipe circuit
status See status

Examples:

$ sudo perl nipe.pl install
$ sudo perl nipe.pl start
$ sudo perl nipe.pl stop
$ sudo perl nipe.pl restart
$ sudo perl nipe.pl status

To test, before starting Nipe, do a test and after starting, repeat the test and see that your ip will change.

# Show IP
curl ifconfig.me/ip
# Show all information
curl ifconfig.me/all

Tip.
You can clone Nipe in the /opt directory then create a Shell Script to run from anywhere.

In the next post we will see the 4nonimizer tool, a powerfull bash script written by Carlos Antonini & Vicente Motos. Used for anonymizing the public IP, also managing the connection to TOR network and to different VPNs providers (OpenVPN).

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Cleber J Santos

I'm a Full Stack Developer with a solid experience in SysAdmin/DevOps, hands-on experience with Python development, websites and API-driven web apps.