Can you Torify instant messaging and irc?

mockison500 · Jul 17, 2005

Can you use Tor with instant messaging and irc?

In the Torifyhowto they give instructions for mIRC and Gaim and on the homepage it says that it works for irc and IM. So I am assuming that I can Torify appz such as mIRC and AIM. I have set these two programs up with Tor via sockscap because of all the talk about dns leaking. The main question I have is about the [warn] messeges in Tor, I don't get one when connecting to a irc server only when I recieve a file? With aol I get [warn] messages too. Is it possible to Torify these appz with file sharing and everything. If I run these programs through sockscap and resolve dns remotely should I still worry about the [warn] messages in Tor? Is ther any way to test from inside either program to see if they leak?
If someone could help me out I would really appreciat it, I have had many places tell me many different things.
My goal in the end would be to use mIRC and AIM completely Torified and not worry about dns leaking. (Obviously the point to all of these is to be anon.)If everytime I get a [warn] message it's indeed leaking, what would be the point of all of this?

mockison500 · Jul 17, 2005

Somone must know more about this,
Please help me out ~

WSFuser · Jul 17, 2005

i found the following in the faq/howto, maybe it can help:

1.1.2. About DNS and tsocks tsocks correctly replaces connect(2) calls with calls to your SOCKS proxy (Tor), but it doesn't do anything about requests to your DNS server. This means that if you refer to any machines by hostname when you're using tsocks, you'll be sending that hostname over the network, perhaps leaking the fact that you are about to connect to the corresponding server.

Other applications that use SOCKS 4 or SOCKS 5 directly often have the same shortcoming.

Tor 0.0.8 (or later) has a workaround for this problem; until we can hack tsocks (or a work-alike) to support DNS, instead of using a hostname directly, first use tor-resolve to resolve the hostname into an IP (via Tor) and then use that IP address with your tsocks-ified application.

See the FAQ for more information.
Click to expand...

and this:

3.20. I keep seeing these warnings about SOCKS and DNS and information leaks. Should I worry? The warning is:

Your application (using socks5 on port %d) is giving Tor only an IP address.
Applications that do DNS resolves themselves may leak information. Consider
using Socks4A (e.g. via privoxy or socat) instead.
If you are running Tor to get anonymity, and you are worried about an attacker who is even slightly clever, then yes, you should worry. Here's why.

The Problem. When your applications connect to servers on the Internet, they need to resolve hostnames that you can read (like tor.eff.org) into IP addresses that the Internet can use (like 209.237.230.66). To do this, your application sends a request to a DNS server, telling it the hostname it wants to resolve. The DNS server replies by telling your application the IP address.

Clearly, this is a bad idea if you plan to connect to the remote host anonymously: when your application sends the request to the DNS server, the DNS server (and anybody else who might be watching) can see what hostname you are asking for. Even if your application then uses Tor to connect to the IP anonymously, it will be pretty obvious that the user making the anonymous connection is probably the same person who made the DNS request.

Where SOCKS comes in. Your application uses the SOCKS protocol to connect to your local Tor client. There are 3 versions of SOCKS you are likely to run into: SOCKS 4 (which only uses IP addresses), SOCKS 5 (which usually uses IP addresses in practice), and SOCKS 4a (which uses hostnames).

When your application uses SOCKS 4 or SOCKS 5 to give Tor an IP address, Tor guesses that it 'probably' got the IP address non-anonymously from a DNS server. That's why it gives you a warning message: you probably aren't as anonymous as you think.

So what can I do? We describe a few solutions below.

If your application speaks SOCKS 4a, use it.

For HTTP (web browsing), use a socks4a-capable HTTP proxy, such as Privoxy. See the Tor documentation for more information.

If you only need one or two hosts, or you are good at programming, you may be able to get a socks-based port-forwarder like socat to work for you; see the Torify HOWTO for examples.

Tor ships with a program called tor-resolve that can use the Tor network to look up hostnames remotely; if you resolve hostnames to IPs with tor-resolve, then pass the IPs to your applications, you'll be fine. (Tor will still give the warning, but now you know what it means.)

See the Torify HOWTO for info on how to run particular applications anonymously.
Click to expand...

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Can you Torify instant messaging and irc?

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Can you Torify instant messaging and irc?

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