Does SocksPlus support UDP?
A. Yes. SocksPlus supports UDP but for security reasons it is implemented as UDP over TCP. While filtering TCP circuits is difficult at best, securely filtering UDP connections is almost impossible. The difficulty is in the difference between the two types of connections. The TCP protocol implements a virtual circuit and keeps a context for the connection, whereas a UDP connection is a datagram protocol where each packet is an independent message. Providing UDP over TCP simplifies the implementation of the UDP relays significantly, and removes most of the problems normally experienced in providing UDP support through a firewall. While this strategy may be less efficient than a native UDP implementation, its simplicity and ease of security management by far justify the additional overhead. NEC believes the difference in performance for a reliable and safe native UDP solution would be negligible.
