SOCKS45

SOCKS45 is a hypothetical extension to the SOCKS family of internet proxy protocols. It does not have a formal standard and is not widely deployed. The term appears in educational materials and speculative discussions about future proxy protocol capabilities, rather than in official specifications or production deployments.

Conceptually, SOCKS45 is described as an evolution of SOCKS5 that preserves the core model of an authenticated proxy but adds a set of modern features. Proposed enhancements include stronger and more flexible authentication methods, such as mutual TLS or token-based schemes, and the use of encrypted channels to protect traffic between client and proxy. The protocol is also envisioned to provide native support for IPv6, improved UDP handling, and more robust NAT traversal. In these designs, UDP relay capabilities would be extended with better reliability and flow control, enabling applications that use datagram transport to operate more effectively through a proxy.

Other common design goals discussed in speculative literature include reduced handshake latency through session resumption or multiplexed streams, and optional backward compatibility modes that allow SOCKS45 clients to fall back to SOCKS5 behavior when interacting with legacy proxies. Some discussions also contemplate more granular access control, audit logging, and pluggable authentication backends to support diverse deployment environments.

Status and adoption are limited: SOCKS45 has no official standard, and there are few or no production implementations. It remains primarily a topic in theory, education, and exploratory research on the future direction of proxy protocols. See also SOCKS, SOCKS5, and proxy technologies.