The blog of dlaa.me

I occasionally find myself on a particular network that's separated from the rest of the Internet by a firewall. The administrators of this network are kind enough to provide both HTTP and SOCKS 4a proxy servers, so it's generally quite easy to get access to the Internet in spite of the firewall. Unfortunately, a couple of the programs I use from time to time support only the SOCKS 5 protocol which is not backwards compatible with the SOCKS 4a protocol...

Well, after bumping into this problem again recently, I checked the SOCKS specifications on Wikipedia and decided it would be pretty straightforward to write a SOCKS 5 proxy server that forwarded all its traffic to a SOCKS 4a proxy server to do the real work. There's just not that much to a proxy server - especially when you're only interested in supporting TCP/IP streams and aren't hoping for production-quality code. :)

So I dashed off a program called Socks5to4a that does exactly what I envisioned. I just run it on my machine, tell it how to connect to the network's SOCKS 4a server, and point my SOCKS 5 applications at localhost. The programs all think they're talking to a real SOCKS 5 server and the network's SOCKS 4a server thinks it's talking to a real SOCKS 4a client - and they're almost right!

With Socks5to4a, things couldn't be simpler - here's what it looks like in action:

D:\T>Socks5to4a myproxy 1080 fallback.example.com
0: Listening on localhost:1080 with fall-back to fallback.example.com...
1: Accepted connection.
1: Reading client request...
1: Client requests fallback.example.com:1234.
1: Connecting to proxy...
1: Connected.
1: Forwarding request...
1: Connected.
1: Sending response...
1: Proxying data...
2: Accepted connection.
2: Reading client request...
2: Client requests fallback.example.com:1234.
2: Connecting to proxy...
2: Connected.
2: Forwarding request...
2: Connected.
2: Sending response...
2: Proxying data...
3: Accepted connection.
3: Reading client request...
3: Client requests 192.168.1.6:2345.
3: Connecting to proxy...
3: Connected.
3: Forwarding request...
3: Connect failed.
3: Retrying with fallback.example.com:2345...
3: Connected.
3: Sending response...
3: Proxying data...
3: Connection closed.
1: Connection closed.
2: Connection closed.

If you paid close attention to the above trace, you probably noticed the "fall-back" behavior. What's going on is that one of the applications I use connects to a server that misreports its public IP address - so subsequent attempts to connect to that IP fail. What I did is add a bit of smarts to Socks5to4a so I can specify an optional fall-back server when I run it; and then any connection failures are automatically (and seamlessly) retried using the fall-back server. Because the fall-back server is used only when necessary, this kludge stays out of the way until it's needed. At which point it's elegant and icky at the same time... :)

Socks5to4a is something I wrote to solve a specific problem I was having - but if it's interesting to you, please go ahead and have a look or give it a try. However, please remember that I specifically did not set out to create the world's best or fastest SOCKS 5 server - the code I wrote works well enough for my scenarios, but may need a bit of tweaking for yours.

[Click here to download the Socks5to4a application along with its complete source code.]

Happy proxying!