Socks Proxy for HttpWebRequest

Question

According to my research whilst trying to solve this problem, it turns out that the .Net WebProxy class does not support Socks proxies - a tad annoying. I also can't seem to find any code or information which explains how to implement Socks 4/5 support via a class which can easily be used with HttpWebRequest (the Proxy property, to be exact).

I've found limited information via google on how I could do this. One suggestion involves changing internet explorer proxy settings - something I'd rather not do.

Does anyone know of anything which could do the job or have any suggestions? Any help would be much appreciated.

Witenagemot

Answer 1

I tried numerous .Net libraries which claimed to support Socks4/5 but found many of them just did not work or would error trying to connect to proxies I knew were functioning.

I've ended up using Chilkat Software's Sock/SSL component which seems to work well for me even if I do have to manually construct the HTTP requests instead of using HttpWebRequest as I would have liked.

• Update note: Chilkat.Http (similar to the HttpWebRequest class) does inherently have support for SOCKS proxies. So don't spend time trying to code your own HTTP requests as I did; just use the Chilkat.Http.SocksHostname, Chilkat.Http.SocksPort and Chilkat.Http.SocksVersion properties.

Witenagemot

Chilkat does now inherently support SOCKS. Chilkat.Http.SocksVersion, Chilkat.Http.SocksHostname, Chilkat.Http.SocksPort. Configuring those properties will force the HTTP connections to utilize SOCKS. Chilkat API reference: link – Criseldacrisey

Answer 2

Changing IE's proxy settings won't help you at all-- the other poster was just observing that it works for IE. Because the .NET Framework doesn't support SOCKS, you'd have to write your own CERN-Proxy to SOCKS-Proxy converter, such that .NET talks to the CERN proxy (the type it supports) and your code converts that to a SOCKS proxy call.

FWIW, this is something I'm presently looking to add to FiddlerCore (www.fiddler2.com/core) because I already have almost all of the code. The only thing I really need is a SOCKSv4a proxy to test against.

Katykatya

The suggestion that got me to that page was to change the IE proxy and then use the WebProxy.DefaultProxy property - social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ncl/thread/…. I'm just surprised that I can't find any class/library to implement this easily via code - it seems like such an obvious thing to want to do. Would be great if you did implement it - I'll keep an eye on the FiddlerCore project. – Witenagemot

Answer 3

Since .NET 6, socks proxies can be used natively with HttpClient. See this issue on GitHub.

Beech

Answer 4

Use Privoxy or same to create http proxy gateway to your socks.

Add this to main config to chain Privoxy and socks:

forward-socks5 / proxy_host:port .

And something like that to enable direct access to your local network:

forward 192.168.*.*/ . forward 10.*.*.*/ . forward 127.*.*.*/ .

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