Use Tor for your C# HTTP clients. Use Privoxy or .NET 6+ SOCKS support to proxy HTTP traffic.
All you need is client code that can use a simple HTTP proxy.
Notice
This product is produced independently from the Tor® anonymity software and carries no guarantee from The Tor Project about quality, suitability or anything else.
Details
Supports:
.NET Core (.NET Standard 2.0 and later, including .NET 5+)
var settings = new TorSharpSettings
{
PrivoxySettings = { Disable = true }
};
// download Tor
using (var httpClient = new HttpClient())
{
var fetcher = new TorSharpToolFetcher(settings, httpClient);
await fetcher.FetchAsync();
}
// execute
using (var proxy = new TorSharpProxy(settings))
{
await proxy.ConfigureAndStartAsync();
var handler = new HttpClientHandler
{
Proxy = new WebProxy(new Uri("socks5://localhost:" + settings.TorSettings.SocksPort))
};
using (handler)
using (var httpClient = new HttpClient(handler))
{
var result = await httpClient.GetStringAsync("https://check.torproject.org/api/ip");
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine("Are we using Tor?");
Console.WriteLine(result);
}
proxy.Stop();
}
Work around the issue by setting up the tools manually and not using TorSharpToolFetcher. See below.
Investigate the issue yourself. The TorSharp.Sandbox project is helpful for this. Pull requests accepted 🏆.
How do I set up the tools manually?
If you don't want to use the TorSharpToolFetcher to download the latest version of the tools for you or if you want to use a specific version of Tor and Privoxy, follow these steps.
Make a directory that will hold the zipped Tor and Privoxy binaries.
Put a Tor Win32 ZIP in that folder with the file name like: tor-win32-{version}.zip
{version} must be parsable as a System.Version meaning it is major.minor[.build[.revision]].
Example: tor-win32-0.3.5.8.zip
The ZIP is expected to have Tor\tor.exe.
Put a Privoxy Win32 ZIP in that folder with a file name like: privoxy-win32-{version}.zip
Again, {version} must be parsable as a System.Version.
Example: privoxy-win32-3.0.26.zip
The ZIP is expected to have privoxy.exe.
Initialize a TorSharpSettings instance where ZippedToolsDirectory is the directory created above.
Pass this settings instance to the TorSharpProxy constructor.
However, you need to adhere to the following guidance.
None of the types in this library should be considered thread safe. Use separate instances for each parallel task/thread.
TorSharpProxy: this is stateful and should not be shared.
TorSharpSettings: the values held in the settings class need to be different for parallel threads, so it doesn't make sense to share instances.
TorSharpToolFetcher: this is stateless so it may be safe, but I would keep this a singleton since you shouldn't have multiple copies of the zipped tools (just multiple copies of the extracted tools).
Parallel threads must have different values for these settings. The defaults will not work.
Must be made unique by you:
TorSharpSettings.ExtractedToolsDirectory: this is the parent directory of the tool working directories. Specify a different value for each thread. In the sample above, I see each parallel task to be a sibling directory, e.g. {some_root}/a, {some_root}/b, etc.
TorSharpSettings.PrivoxySettings.Port: this is the Privoxy listen port. Each Privoxy process needs its own port. Can be ignored if TorSharpSettings.PrivoxySettings.Disable is true.
TorSharpSettings.TorSettings.SocksPort: this is the Tor SOCKS listen port. Each Tor process needs its own port.
Must be unique, but only if you set them:
TorSharpSettings.VirtualDesktopName: this is automatically generated based on ExtractedToolsDirectory, but if you manually set it, it must be unique.
TorSharpSettings.TorSettings.ControlPort: this is the Tor SOCKS listen port. Each Tor process needs its own port.
TorSharpSettings.TorSettings.AdditionalSockPorts: if used, it must have unique values.
TorSharpSettings.TorSettings.HttpTunnelPort: if used, it must have a unique value.
TorSharpSettings.TorSettings.DataDirectory: the default is based ExtractedToolsDirectory, but if you manually set it, it must be unique.
In general, directory configuration values must be different from all of the other directories, except TorSharpSettings.ZippedToolsDirectory which should not be downloaded to in parallel by TorSharpToolFetcher but can be read from in parallel with multiple TorSharpProxy instances. Port configuration values need to all be unique.
How do I change what TorSharp logs?
By default, TorSharp lets the tools (Tor, Privoxy) log to the main process stdout and stderr. If you want to disable this behavior, set TorSharpSettings.WriteToConsole to false. If you want to intercept the output from the tools, attach to the TorSharpProxy.OutputDataReceived (for stdout) and TorSharpProxy.ErrorDataReceived (for stderr) events. In your event handler, you can log to some external sink or enqueue the line for processing. The event handlers are fired from a task using the default task scheduler so this blocks one of the shared worker threads. Don't do too much heavy lifting there, I guess! If you want to know which tool sent the log message, look at the DataEventArgs.ExecutablePath property.
Privoxy fetched by TorSharp fails to start? Try installing missing dependencies.
It's possible some expected shared libraries aren't there. Try to look at the error message and judge which library needs to be installed from your distro's package repository.
Ubuntu 20.04
Problem: On Ubuntu 20.04 the following errors may appear:
/tmp/TorExtracted/privoxy-linux64-3.0.29/usr/sbin/privoxy: error while loading shared libraries: libmbedtls.so.12: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Solution: install the missing dependencies. Note that these steps install packages from the Debian repository. This is very much not recommended by official guidance. For my own testing, it works well enough. I use this trick in the GitHub Action workflow. ⚠️ Do this at your own risk!
I have the checksum verification in there because these pages have SSL problems and the advertised URL is HTTP not HTTPS (by design I think).
Debian 10
Problem: On Debian 10 the following errors may appear:
/tmp/TorExtracted/privoxy-linux64-3.0.29/usr/sbin/privoxy: error while loading shared libraries: libbrotlidec.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/tmp/TorExtracted/privoxy-linux64-3.0.29/usr/sbin/privoxy: error while loading shared libraries: libmbedtls.so.12: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Privoxy fetched by TorSharp fails to start? Try ExecutablePathOverride.
On Linux, the Privoxy binaries fetched seem to be built for the latest Debian and Ubuntu distributions. I can confirm that some other distributions don't work.
I'm no Linux expert but my guess is that there are missing shared libraries that are different on the running platform than the Debian platform that Privoxy was compiled for. The easiest workaround is to install Privoxy to your system and set the TorSharpSettings.PrivoxySetting.ExecutablePathOverride configuration setting to "privoxy" (i.e. use Privoxy from PATH).
After you install it, make sure privoxy is in the PATH.
[joel@linux]$ which privoxy
/usr/sbin/privoxy
After this is done, just configure TorSharp to use the system Privoxy with the ExecutablePathOverride setting:
var settings = new TorSharpSettings();
settings.PrivoxySettings.ExecutablePathOverride = "privoxy";
Note that you may encounter warning or error messages in the output due to new configuration being used with an older executable. I haven't ran into any problems with this myself but it's possible things could get weird.
CentOS 7
Problem: the following error appears:
/tmp/TorExtracted/privoxy-linux64-3.0.28/usr/sbin/privoxy: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Solution: install Privoxy. It is available on epel-release.
/tmp/TorExtracted/privoxy-linux64-3.0.29/usr/sbin/privoxy: error while loading shared libraries: libbrotlidec.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/tmp/TorExtracted/privoxy-linux64-3.0.29/usr/sbin/privoxy: error while loading shared libraries: libmbedtls.so.12: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Solution: install Privoxy. It is available in the default source lists.
