SOCKS Proxy Protocol

In the context of Cloak, as in that of other Tor pluggable transports, SOCKS proxies play a crucial role in enabling communication between the Tor Client and Cloak components while facilitating the exchange of data.

In addition to the SOCKS proxy that Tor itself exposes to allow external applications to route their traffic through the Tor network, both Cloak client gateways and Cloak bridges expose SOCKS proxy endpoints. The Cloak client gateway’s SOCKS proxy enables it to receive Tor traffic while the Cloak bridge’s reverse SOCKS proxy allows it to accept local Tor connections.

When Tor is configured to use Cloak it routes the traffic through its SOCKS proxies. The proxies act as middle-men between the local Tor application and the WebRTC encoding and decoding hooks.