SOCKS connection establishment explained

There is a really good explanation of everything that happens during a HTTP-request that is relayed through a SOCKS5-proxy here. Nonetheless, I decided to make a similar post mostly in order to really figure it out myself. So here it goes.

I ran a little SOCKS5-server on my machine on port 8123. I then configured Firefox to use 0.0.0.0:8123 as a SOCKS-proxy and enabled the "remote DNS"-function. After that, I opened a website. During all this, I let wireshark capture the loopback device. If you want to see what kinds of values the different fields can take, the wikipedia article lists them all. The RFC is also pretty short and gives some more detailed explanations.

Using a Raspberry Pi as a (TOR)-SOCKS-Proxy

Today I played around a bit with my dormant Raspberry Pi. My goal was to try and set it up in a way that allows me to just set the Pi as a SOCKS-Proxy in Firefox and tunnel my traffic over TOR this way.

The benefit is that I never have to install TOR on any of my machines but can just connect through the proxy from all of them. I also wanted to find out how something like this generally works.

Tunneling OpenVPN through multiple hops

For my bachelor thesis I have to set up an experimental network configuration with multiple OpenVPN-clients and servers.

The goal is to establish a tunnel to a host by tunneling OpenVPN through multiple other hosts.

I use vagrant to set up some virtual machines on my real machine in order to experiment with the setup and the configurations.