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Date: Fri, 5 Mar 93 13:35:01 GMT
From: Dr I M Dunkin 
Message-Id: <9303051335.AA08920@uk0x04.ggr.co.uk>
To: info-multinet@tgv.com
Subject: Socks appeal

Is there any interest at TGV in the `Socks' package? 

For those not familiar with it, Socks is `an Internet socket service
consisting of client library routines and a daemon which interact
through a simple protocol to provide convenient and secure network
connectivity through a firewall host'. 

To explain:

Say you have a few systems on your local, private network.  For
security, you want to put a firewall system between them and the Wide
World, and you want this firewall to provide proxy service for any of
your accesses (eg telnet, ftp) to the Wide World: your local systems
will not talk to the wide world _themselves_, but will talk instead to a
proxy server on the firewall system, which will then do so on their
behalf.  This is a familar mechanism, provided, for example, as part of
DEC's SEAL firewall package. 

Socks gives an alternative, _generic_ mechanism for this.  You run the
sockd daemon on your firewall host and it serves as a generic proxy
server for any clients (eg telnet, ftp) on your local hosts that have
been linked with the socks client library. 

It's simple enough to set this up with sockd running on a Unix firewall
host and with socks-complaint clients built on local Unix systems. 

But if you have local VMS systems too, perhaps running Multinet TCP/IP,
you have a problem: how can you build modified telnet, ftp &c, clients
linked with the socks client library, to use the Socks system? 

..unless of course TGV were to provide this option.  Do they?  Is there
any interest in this?? 

    I.

(Socks was written by David and Michelle R Koblas, and is available by
anonymous ftp from s1.gov.  It was also described in a recent USENIX
Security Proceedings.)