Introducing Torsocks - Transparent socks for Tor

[Robert Hogan]

On Monday 27 October 2008 19:04:38 Kyle Williams wrote:
> Very cool.
> How is this different than proxychains?
> It seems like they both do the same thing.
>

I actually wasn't aware of proxychains, which looks like it was written 
about the same time as tsocks.

You're right that they more or less do the same thing, and they more or 
less do it the same way - by using LD_PRELOAD to hook a program's calls 
for writing to and reading from the network, including DNS.

Apart from the fact that proxychains allows you to chain your traffic 
through multiple proxies I think torsocks does the following 'extra' bits:

- It supports some dns/network calls that proxychains does not, e.g. 
getpeerinfo.
- It blocks primitive UDP calls by the application (to help prevent DNS 
leaks via UDP).
- It supports the use of hidden services.

I haven't looked at proxychains very closely and I have to confess I 
haven't even used it, but I *think* that is about it.

>
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 6:13 AM, Robert Hogan 
<robert at roberthogan.net>wrote:
> > Linux users may be familiar with the various patches for tsocks that
> > make it
> > safe for use with Tor.
> >
> >  https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TSocksPatches
> >
> > Torsocks takes all of the patches to tsocks listed at the link above:
> >
> >  http://code.google.com/p/torsocks/source/browse/trunk#trunk/patches
> >
> > applies some other enhancements:
> >
> >  http://code.google.com/p/torsocks/source/browse/trunk/ChangeLog
> >
> > and incorporates them into a new project:
> >
> >  http://code.google.com/p/torsocks/
> >
> > Torsocks allows you to use most socks-friendly applications in a safe
> > way with
> > Tor. Once you have installed torsocks, just launch it like so:
> >
> >  usewithtor [application]
> >
> > So, for example you can use ssh to a some.ssh.com by doing:
> >
> >  usewithtor ssh username at some.ssh.com
> >
> > or launch pidgin by doing:
> >
> >  usewithtor pidgin
> >
> > You can download the current build at:
> >
> >  http://torsocks.googlecode.com/files/torsocks-1.0-beta.tar.gz
> >
> > Torsocks is released under the GNU GPL licence v2. As far as I can
> > make out this is compatible with the original tsocks and all
> > subsequent patches.


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