IpV4 Masquerading on a local network

Hardware Hub Networking
1

To be frank, I am a complete noob at networking, so to some of you this question may sound silly, but is It possible to "hide" or "scramble" your IpV4 address, so that other machines sharing your network would be able to decide what your TRUE IpV4 address is, therefore not being able to pinpoint from which machine it came from.

This question came to light after finishing my personal project in school, which was a simple socket messenger programmed in Python, that would simply send and receive TCP messages back and forth between a host and client.

However, now I feel my inner gremlin calling at me to develop this further, and I want to be able to chat with my friends in my computer science class, in safety knowing that the I.T admins would not be able to intercept and pinpoint network connections from machine to machine. (Think the eye of Sauron as the admins, and myself starting up a TCP listener comparable to putting on the ring of power)

All I want to know it possible to hide myself away from those controlling the network( I.e The I.T guys), or is it just futile.

Thanks

2

Nope. Best you can do is hide the contents of the message. You can't hide your IP address for reasons that should be obvious.

2 Likes
3

IP addresses are not used on the local LAN, MAC addresses are. IP addresses are used to traverse routers. If you use a router with Network Address Translation enabled, then only your local router will know/care what your IP address is. Of course everyone will know the public address of your router, else you wouldn't be able to communicate with the outside world.

4

IP addresses are used in local networks they are just not used for switching. You still need to know the sending and destination address to communicate with two devices over any (TCP/IP) network.

1 Like
5

Okay thank you so much for your help.

P.S This community is amazing.

1 Like
6

I guess it might make your IP unreachable from other computers if you try arp spoofing or DNS poisoning but its not recommended or you could use http proxys/vpns instead