socks-router

socks-router

socks-router is a proxy router; routing is configured based on hostnames and IP addresses.

It accepts requests using any of the following protocols:

• SOCKS4, SOCKS4a, SOCKS5
• HTTP (CONNECT and normal request methods)
• CONNECT (similar to HTTP CONNECT, used e.g. by openssl)

It can forward requests to a SOCKS5 proxy or use a direct TCP connection.

Build

Build using go:

go get github.com/Jcd1230/socks-router

There is also a systemd service file which assumes the binary ends up in /usr/bin and the config in /etc/socks-router.routes and listens to 127.0.0.1:1080 and [::1]:1080. After modifying (or creating) the file you need to restart the service.

Usecase

A typical usecase would be establishing a SSH-connection with a "DynamicForward 127.0.0.1:PORT" option. Now you can connect to systems through the SOCKS5-proxy listening on 127.0.0.1:PORT as if you'd be on the SSH target machine. That way you can access internal systems behind firewalls.

Now you don't want to route all traffic through the proxy (e.g. by setting the proxy property in your web browser), as you might want to use the application normally too if you are not connected, or have multiple SSH-connections to different sites.

Now you can setup socks-router to run a local proxy and route only requests for "protected" hostnames / IP addresses through the SSH proxy, and use direct connections for everything else.

Example

~/.ssh/config

Host gateway.example.com
    DynamicForward 127.0.0.1:2080

/etc/socks-router.routes or ~/socks-routes

10.40.40.0/24     socks5://127.0.0.1:2080
.example.com      socks5://127.0.0.1:2080

Configuration

The configuration consists of a list of routing rules.

Each line is handled as follow:

• leading and trailing space is ignored
• '#' till end of line marks a comment
• empty lines are ignored
• '^' at the beginning marks regular expression match; not supported yet (might handle '#' differently)
• otherwise each line contains a "match" and a "target" column separated by whitespace
• valid matches:
  • "/prefix" and ":port" are optional
  • ip-addr/prefix:port ":port" is optional
  • ipv6-addr Needs to contain at least two colons. Cannot specify a port that way!
  • ipv4-addr:port
  • domain.name:port ":port" is optional trailing dots are ignored leading dot means match domain and all subdomains
  • *:port ":port" is optional matches all addresses and domain names
• valid targets:
  • socks5://address:port
  • direct

Routing

Each request either uses a hostname or an IP address; socks-router does not try to resolve hostnames into IP addresses or vice versa for routing. This means that a request using a hostname is only routed through "hostname rules" (and the wildcard '*'), and a request using an IP address only routed using IP-address based rules.

The IP address matching uses net.IPNet.Contains, which interprets IPv4 as part of IPv6 by padding it with zeroes on the left.

If no rule matched the default is to route "direct", i.e. using a local TCP connection.

Application configuration

Some applications have dedicated configurations for proxy settings (Firefox for example), and might default to "system default" or "direct connection". Other applications (Chrome) always use the "system default".

"system default" is a tricky thing though; there doesn't seem to exist a single standard how to specify it, although it mostly is based on the "HTTP_PROXY" environment variable.

Depending on the application it might expect a protocol in the value like this:

HTTP_PROXY="http://127.0.0.1:1080"

or, if they support SOCKS5 as well:

HTTP_PROXY="socks5://127.0.0.1:1080"

Others might only want an address and port like:

HTTP_PROXY="127.0.0.1:1080"

The "icedtea" implementation for "Java Web Start" (JNLP) can be configured through the itweb-settings application.