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Is there a way to hide server's IP Address and Autonomous System Number from search?

For an example, you do not want users to look up the server location or where it is leased from.

Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
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Shawn Smith
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    Don't put it on the Internet. Why do you want to hide your server's IP? How would you access the server if your IP was not publicly available? – heavyd Jan 27 '14 at 22:58

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Short answer, no. Long answer, sort-of, if you're running a web server only, and are willing to use a third-party service.

In order to serve its purpose, a server's IP address needs to be available to all clients who need to contact it. This is generally fulfilled using DNS, giving clients the ability to find the server's IP address using only a name. The IP address is absolutely required in order for packets to get across the internet from your clients to your server. Similarly, any clients of the service can't help but expose their IP address to your server, as that's the only way for packets to get back across the internet to them to deliver your server's responses.

Moving on to ASNs, there's a similar issue. BGP is used on the internet to tell routers where to send internet traffic. If you hid an ASN from the internet in general, traffic to the IP addresses in that ASN would have no way to get to the appropriate router, and would never reach your server.

There are however, services that provide an external reverse proxy, such as https://www.cloudflare.com/. These services allow you to give out their IP address in your DNS, and in turn pass on traffic to your server, however these services are generally only useful for a web server. If you are running another type of server (such as a server for a video game, or an FTP server for hosting files), these services don't know how to forward that type of traffic.

Jeremy Sturdivant
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  • Thanks Mr. Sturdivant! But I'm pretty much aware of these. The reason has nothing to do with security but actually branding. For an example, if you type our site on domaintools.com, you will see these information. We would rather not have them displayed. We are running multiple servers and for again ... branding purpose cannot run our system via Cloudflare or Incapsula. I wish there is a trick to achieve this. – Shawn Smith Jan 28 '14 at 12:11