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What is torsocks?

Torsocks allows you to use most applications in a safe way with Tor. It ensures that DNS requests are handled safely and explicitly rejects any traffic other than TCP from the application you're using.

Torsocks is an ELF shared library that is loaded before all others. The library overrides every needed Internet communication libc function calls such as connect(2) or gethostbyname(3).

BE ADVISE: It uses the LD_PRELOAD mechanism (man ld.so.8) which means that if the application is not using the libc or for instance uses raw syscalls, torsocks will be useless and the traffic will not go through Tor.

This process is transparent to the user and if torsocks detects any communication that can't go through the Tor network such as UDP traffic, for instance, the connection is denied. If, for any reason, there is no way for torsocks to provide the Tor anonymity guarantee to your application, torsocks will force the application to quit and stop everything.

Requirements

- autoconf
- automake
- libtool
- gcc

Installation

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

If you are compiling it from the git repository, run ./autogen.sh before the configure script.

Using torsocks

Once you have installed torsocks, just launch it like so:

$ torsocks [application]

So, for example you can use ssh to a some.ssh.com by doing:

$ torsocks ssh username@some.ssh.com

You can use the torsocks library without the script provided:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/full/path/to/libtorsocks.so your_app

For more details, please see the torsocks.1, torsocks.8 and torsocks.conf.5 man pages. Also, you can use -h, --help for all the possible options of the torsocks script.

A configuration file named torsocks.conf is also provided for the user to control some parameters.

More informations

torsocks is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Mailing list for help is tor-talk@lists.torproject.org and for development use tor-dev@lists.torproject.org. You can find the project also on IRC server irc.oftc.net (OFTC) in #tor and #tor-dev.

See more information about the Tor project at https://www.torproject.org.