ShinySOCKS

Mission Statement

To create a small, ultra-fast SOCKS proxy server that just works.

Background

I sometimes use VPN. In one case, I had VPN access only from a Windows 7 virtual machine trough some proprietary "security by obscurity", obscenely expensive enterprise VPN software. In order to work efficiently, I needed to connect my Linux workstation to that VPN. Network routing and IP forwarding seems not to work, so the second best option in my case is SOCKS. Socks trough Putty works, kind of. It's slow and unreliable.

I tried a few free SOCKS servers. Neither of them worked, so therefore I'm spending a few hours writing my own.

Blog posts mentioning the project

My blog

Current State

The project has been in maintenance mode for ages. It just works. However, these days I'm fixing some build issues to make it simpler for you or other hackers to submit pull requests with new features ;)

I'm also in the process of updating the code from mostly C++11 to C++20. But it's not a very high priority - after all, the application work well as it is.

The SOCKS server works for SOCKS 4, 4a and 5 under Linux, Windows and MacOS.

IPv6 and binding (reverse connections) are not yet supported.

How I use it

I start ShinySOCKS on the command-line (cmd.exe) in a Windows or Linux VM with VPN. Then I ssh to whatever servers on the VPN network I desire - using ShinySOCKS as a proxy.

From Linux: $ ssh -o ProxyCommand='nc -x 192.168.0.10:1080 %h %p' jgaa@cool-server

For accessing intranet web pages over the VPN, I some times used the Foxy Proxy Firefox plugin. It simplifies things, and make my work-flow smooth. This also improved my privacy, as the VPN host will only see the web traffic going to the intranet sites.

How I test it

If it run locally, and I have curl installed, I can test it like this:

curl -L --socks5-hostname socks5://localhost:1080 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jgaa/shinysocks/master/ci/test.txt

Docker

You can also pull a Docker image with the server from Docker Hub.

docker pull jgaafromnorth/shinysocks

To run it.

docker run --rm --name shiny -p 1080:1080 -d jgaafromnorth/shinysocks

To test it on the command-line with curl:

# Let curl do the DNS lookup
curl -L -x socks5://localhost:1080 https://www.google.com/

# Let shinysocks do the DNS lookup

curl -L --socks5-hostname socks5://localhost:1080 https://www.google.com/

You can now set the socks 5 address to ip 127.0.0.1 port 1080 in your applications (for example Firefox') proxy settings and test it.

Command line

You can download a zipfile with the binary and run in from the command line:

Linux

After you have extracted the zip archive:

chmod +x shinysocks

./shinysocks -l debug -c ""

Windows

shinysocks -l debug -c ""

MacOS

chmod +x shinysocks

./shinysocks -l debug -c ""

To disable logging, set the log level to none.

Supported platforms

Linux
Windows
MacOS

License

ShinySOCKS is released under GPLv3.

It is Free. Free as in free speech - at least in imaginary countries, where free speech is still allowed ;)