History

Back to torsocks...

This page documents the history of torsocks leading up to the current version linked above... all its various old names, locations, authors... in one place.

A complete history of changes is maintained in the http://code.google.com/p/torsocks/source/browse/trunk/ChangeLog The initial working copy of torsocks was obtained through the following steps in June 2008:

• Tsocks was downloaded from the project's SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=17338.
• All patches listed at http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TSocksPatches https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TSocksPatches in March 2008 were applied. In particular, the patch from Total Information Security that hooks DNS requests and passesthem to Tor. The original link for this patch is now dead and the authors are no longer available at the email addresses supplied in the patch's source.
• Weasel's getpeername() patch and some build-related patches from https://giig.ugr.es/~rgarcia/tsocks/ were applied.
• All references to tsocks in the project source files were renamed to torsocks.
• The project was then migrated to an automake/autoconf build system.

To help with reconstructing the above steps a list of applied patches is available in the http://code.google.com/p/torsocks/source/browse/trunk/patches subdirectory of the torsocks http://code.google.com/p/torsocks/source/browse/trunk/ tree.

The first release of torsocks contained the following enhancements:

• Torifying reverse DSN requests through gethostbyaddr()
• Blocking of UDP traffic from sendto() and its variants.
• Use of Tor-friendly defaults if no configuration file available.
• The addition of all RFC defined private address ranges to the default configuration.

claws-mail

• outdated: https://rorschachstagebuch.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/claws-mail-zweit-profil-fur-tor/
• outdated: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2010-04/msg00131.html

tsocks

This content imported from former location: doc/TSocksPatches

The current torsocks code is found here: [https://gitweb.torproject.org/torsocks.git/] . Everything below is historical and preserved for that purpose.

The program tsocks shows promise as a wrapper script for making individual client applications work with Tor. Already, tsocks intercepts system calls that use the TCP stack and encapsulates them using SOCKS. However, there are a number of problems with tsocks. For example, tsocks does not intercept gethostbyname() system calls, leaking DNS requests in a manner that compromises the anonymity of Tor users. Additionally, tsocks contains a number of serious bugs, and it does not currently build on Mac OS X. For these reasons, we do not currently recommend that Tor users use tsocks. Nonetheless, we believe that it may be sufficient to create a new version of tsocks that carefully integrates all of the following patches:

1. Patch from Total Information Security to resolve the DNS leakage problem and allow access to addresses with nonstandard hostnames (e.g. those ending in .onion).

2. Patch from Marc Abramowitz to allow tsocks to compile on Mac OS X. (Host marc.abramowitz.info i no longer in DNS, so link is dead)

3. Patch from weasel to resolve an infinite loop that occurs when the server just disconnects when tsocks expects a reply.

4. Patch from weasel to intercept getpeername().

5. Patch from Roderick Schertler to fix a minor bug in the documentation.

6. Some patches offered by the FreeBSD ports maintainers.

7. Patch from Roger Dingledine to only call 127.0.0.0/8 as local if the config file doesn't provide one.

There is now a fork of tsocks specifically for use with Tor, called torsocks.

Torsocks contains patches 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 above. It also contains a number of enhancements.

Historically, there was also Ruben Garcia's tsocks incorporating the above patches, but that has now been deprecated for use with tor according to the link. It is still used by people who don't use tor but want to socksify an application.