279520 - lacks SOCKS4a support

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 134105

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Guido]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041106 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041106 Firefox/1.0

Currently there is a large gap in Firefox (and all Mozilla products) support of
SOCKS proxies.  <a
href="http://archive.socks.permeo.com/protocol/socks4a.protocol">SOCKS4a</a> is
an official extension onto the <a
href="http://www.socks.permeo.com/AboutSOCKS/SOCKSvE.asp">SOCKSv4 protocol</a>
that eliminates the requirement for SOCKSv4 clients to resolve internal and
external domain names.

Having SOCKS4a support is important because without it, Firefox <a
href="http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/CLIENTS">cannot be used</a> as an anonymous
browser or part of an anonymous network, such as <a
href="http://tor.eff.org/">Tor</a>, without the help of <a
href="http://www.privoxy.org/">additional programs</a> at the OS level because
it leaks info about DNS requests.  This is cumbersome and avoidable.

If we are serious about marketing Firefox as a secure alternative to other
applications, then we need to build in support for such anonymous networks (Tor
is not the only one that needs this change).  Adding in SOCKS4a support
shouldn't be a hard task.  I am not familiar with Firefox code, but I'll be
looking to get familiar with it enough to start coding this myself.  I don't
know just how far I'll get so is there another developer willing to add this to
their to-do list?  I actually could benefit from this feature immediately as
part of an anonymity experiment I'm setting up so I'd appreciate it if someone
could beat me to it.  Anybody?

More info - <a
href="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#head-22fc593265f361d294908a7708c02b79e9c03c45">I
keep seeing these warnings about SOCKS and DNS and information leaks. Should I
worry?</a>

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

bug 134105 added this, though after firefox 1.0

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 134105 ***

Comment 2

[benc]

V/dupe.

Comment 4

[Shane Bundy]

Strange. This bug didn't come up in the search. Oh well.