What is torsocks?

This is a fork of the [tsocks project](http://sourceforge.net/project/ showfiles.php?group_id=17338). The purpose of this fork is to maintain a working implementation of tsocks that is primarily useful for Tor.

The project homepage is:

http://code.google.com/p/torsocks

Features of THIS fork

• support for TORSOCKS_SERVER, TORSOCKS_SERVER_PORT and TORSOCKS_LOCAL env settings.
• support for --server, --port and --local cmdline arguments.
• default TORSOCKS_PASSWORD: null string.

Using 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@some.ssh.com 

or launch pidgin by doing:

usewithtor pidgin 

The following applications are known to be compatible with usewithtor:

Type  Application   Comments
COMM  ssh
COMM  telnet        (plaintext passwords are not recommended with Tor)
IM    pidgin
IM    kopete
IRC   konversation
MAIL  claws-mail
DEV   svn
IRC   xchat
IRC   irssi
IRC   silc

Differences between torsocks and tsocks

A complete history of changes is maintained in the Changelog. The initial working copy of torsocks was obtained through the following steps in June 2008:

• Tsocks was downloaded from the project's sourceforge repository. (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=17338)
• All patches listed at http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/ TSocksPatches in March 2008 were applied. In particular, the patch from Total Information Security that hooks DNS requests and passes them 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 patches/ subdirectory of the torsocks source tree.

Enhancements unique to torsocks

The first release of torsocks contained the following enhancements:

• Torifying reverse dns 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.

Maintainers of Torsocks

Torsocks is maintained by: Robert Hogan (robert at roberthogan.net) Ruben Garcia (ruben at ugr.es)

Links

Original tsocks project (apparently abandoned): http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=17338

Ruben's fork of tsocks on which this is based: https://giig.ugr.es/~rgarcia/tsocks/

The Tor project's list of tsocks patches: http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TSocksPatches

The Tor project: https://www.torproject.org