cproxy

cproxy can redirect TCP and UDP traffic made by a program to a proxy, without requiring the program supporting a proxy.

What you can achieve with cproxy: All the things listed on for example V2Ray Guide, including advanced configurations like reverse proxy for NAT traversal, and you can apply different proxy on different applications.

Compared to many existing complicated transparent proxy setup, cproxy usage is as easy as proxychains, but unlike proxychains, it works on any program (including static linked Go programs) and redirects DNS requests.

Note: The proxy used by cproxy should be a transparent proxy port (such as V2Ray's dokodemo-door inbound and shadowsocks ss-redir). A good news is that even if you only have a SOCKS5 or HTTP proxy, there are tools that can convert it to a transparent proxy for you (for example, transocks , ipt2socks and ip2socks-go).

Installation

You can install by downloading the binary from the release page or install with cargo:

cargo install cproxy

Here's a oneliner that downloads the latest release and put it in your /usr/local/bin/:

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/NOBLES5E/cproxy/releases/latest | grep "browser_download_url.*x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.zip" | cut -d : -f 2,3 | tr -d \" | wget -qi - -O /tmp/cproxy.zip && unzip -j /tmp/cproxy.zip cproxy -d /tmp && sudo mv /tmp/cproxy /usr/local/bin/ && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cproxy && rm /tmp/cproxy.zip

Usage

Simple usage: just like proxychains

You can launch a new program with cproxy with:

sudo cproxy --port <destination-local-port> -- <your-program> --arg1 --arg2 ...

All TCP connections requests will be proxied. If your local transparent proxy support DNS address overriding, you can also redirect DNS traffic with --redirect-dns:

sudo cproxy --port <destination-local-port> --redirect-dns -- <your-program> --arg1 --arg2 ...

For an example setup, see wiki.

Simple usage: use iptables tproxy

If your system support tproxy, you can use tproxy with --mode tproxy:

sudo cproxy --port <destination-local-port> --mode tproxy -- <your-program> --arg1 --arg2 ...
# or for existing process
sudo cproxy --port <destination-local-port> --mode tproxy --pid <existing-process-pid>

With --mode tproxy, there are several differences:

• All UDP traffic are proxied instead of only DNS UDP traffic to port 53.
• Your V2Ray or shadowsocks service should have tproxy enabled on the inbound port. For V2Ray, you need "tproxy": "tproxy" as in V2Ray Documentation. For shadowsocks, you need -u as shown in shadowsocks manpage.

An example setup can be found here.

Note that when you are using the tproxy mode, you can override the DNS server address with cproxy --mode tproxy --override-dns <your-dns-server-addr> .... This is useful when you want to use a different DNS server for a specific application.

Advanced usage: proxy an existing process

With cproxy, you can even proxy an existing process. This is very handy when you want to proxy existing system services such as docker. To do this, just run

sudo cproxy --port <destination-local-port> --pid <existing-process-pid>

The target process will be proxied as long as this cproxy command is running. You can press Ctrl-C to stop proxying.

Advanced usage: debug a program's network activity with iptables LOG target

With cproxy, you can easily debug a program's traffic in netfilter. Just run the program with

sudo cproxy --mode trace <your-program>

You will be able to see log in dmesg. Note that this requires a recent enough kernel and iptables.

How does it work?

cproxy creates a unique cgroup for the proxied program, and redirect its traffic with packet rules.

Limitations

• cproxy requires root access to modify cgroup.
• Currently only tested on Linux.

Similar projects

There are some awesome existing work:

• graftcp: work on most programs, but cannot proxy UDP (such as DNS) requests. graftcp also has performance hit on the underlying program, since it uses ptrace.
• proxychains: easy to use, but not working on static linked programs (such as Go programs).
• proxychains-ng: similar to proxychains.
• cgproxy: cgproxy also uses cgroup to do transparent proxy, and the idea is similar to cproxy's. There are some differences in UX and system requirements:
  • cgproxy requires system cgroup v2 support, while cproxy works with both v1 and v2.
  • cgproxy requires a background daemon process cgproxyd running, while cproxy does not.
  • cgproxy requires tproxy, which is optional in cproxy.
  • cgproxy can be used to do global proxy, while cproxy does not intended to support global proxy.