[tor-dev] Transparent Proxy: how does it work?

[CJ]

Hello dear torrorists :)

I'm wanting to do some weird things with iptables in order to force some
connections through Tor's TransProxy, but before that I have an
interrogation on its internals:

How does it detect if we're wanting to use, let's say, SMTP over Tor?
Is there any kind of sniffer that tells tor "ok, so this one wants to go
to mail.google.com:25, this other one to www.ethack.org:443 with SSL" ?

If so, how does it work? It seems it may cause some problems when using
Tor on a gateway, like some android device with tethering: forcing
tethered connections through tor [orbot] seems to be really hard.


Thank you in advance for your enlightenment.

Cheers,

C.