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Building the latest version of ProxyChains-NG on Ubuntu 18.10

April 19, 2019

Today I was working with an older version of ProxyChains which has the habit of printing to stdout:

ProxyChains-3.1 (http://proxychains.sf.net)

This even occurs when quiet_mode is added to the configuration file. This is very annoying if the output is, for example, JSON that one wants to pipe into another program like jq.

So I decided to build ProxyChains-NG version 4.14. And if this version has the same problem at least I can remove the offending line in the source code and compile a version without it.

In order to be able to write down complete instructions for others to follow I created a new virtual machine with Ubuntu version 18.10.

I used the following steps to download, compile, and install the latest version of ProxyChains-NG:

sudo apt install -y git make gcc
git clone https://github.com/rofl0r/proxychains-ng.git
cd proxychains-ng
make
sudo make install
cd ..
rm -rf proxychains-ng

This installs proxychains4 in /usr/local/bin. In order to test the program I first created a configuration file named proxychains.conf in the current directory with the following lines:

random_chain
chain_len = 1
tcp_read_time_out 15000
tcp_connect_time_out 10000
[ProxyList]
socks5 127.0.0.1 1080

Next, I created a SOCKS5 tunnel to johnbokma.com as follows:

ssh -fND 1080 john@johnbokma.com -p XXXXX

Note that I use a non-default port which I have masked above for security reasons.

Next, I tested as follows:

proxychains4 -q curl -s ip-api.com/json/ | jq '.'

Note how proxychains4 is put in quiet mode with option -q and cURL in silent mode with option -s.

This command gave the following output:

{
  "as": "AS33070 Rackspace Hosting",
  "city": "San Antonio",
  "country": "United States",
  "countryCode": "US",
  "isp": "Rackspace Hosting",
  "lat": 29.508,
  "lon": -98.3942,
  "org": "Rackspace",
  "query": "174.143.254.155",
  "region": "TX",
  "regionName": "Texas",
  "status": "success",
  "timezone": "America/Chicago",
  "zip": "78218"
}

The above query value shows that that curl connects via the SOCKS5 tunnel to this service, and hence the IP address of johnbokma.com is reported back.

I use jq to format the output of this online service. This program is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor, which here is used with just its identity filter '.' to pretty print the output.

You can install this program as follows:

sudo apt install -y jq

If you work with JSON and cURL a lot, I recommend to read the manual of jq because it can do much more than pretty printing its input.

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