Use the Chromium Browser with a SOCKS Proxy

Using Chromium with a SOCKS Proxy

Using a SOCKS proxy when browsing enables you to circumvent firewalls.

Because you tunnel your browser traffic through an encrypted SSH connection, you also hide your browsing history effectively from your local ISP. You also need to make sure that your DNS requests are being tunneled through the proxy, else they’ll leak the identity of the sites that you are visiting.

Here’s how to fire up your Chromium browser with a SOCKS proxy, and while still preventing those dreaded DNS leaks:

$ chromium --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:8080" --host-resolver-rules="MAP * ~NOTFOUND , EXCLUDE localhost"

You can test if it works easily and by opening your favorite search engine and typing “what is my IP” to find out the IP address that your browser is using.

Alternatively, do it the command line way and hit up e.g ipinfo.io using cURL:

$ curl ipinfo.io

After you can confirm that it works well, just go and update your shortcut or launcher properties and you’re good to go.

Chromium will now launch and connect to the interwebz via your SOCKS proxy listening on e.g localhost 8080. You’ll need to setup of SOCKS proxy first of course, which can be done fairly easily using the -D flag and SSH’ing into your remote box:

$ ssh -v -D 8080 yourremoteboxadress.xyz

:wq