Good Old SOCKS5: Why It Finally Needed TLS After Three Decades
Some technologies arrive with a bang, spend a few years at the peak of popularity, and then gradually disappear as something newer takes their place. SOCKS5…
Engineering Notes
Archive 2002–2026
Technical Blog
Engineering notes, deep dives, implementation stories, and practical articles on Windows networking, packet filtering, proxies, VPNs, and related systems work.
Archive Scope:
28 Published Posts
Historical Span:
2002 – 2026
Domains:
NDIS • LWF • SOCKS5 • WireGuard • Win32 I/O
Author:
Vadim Smirnov
2026
The Imitation Game: How Modern Solutions Make WireGuard Invisible to DPI
WireGuard quickly became a popular VPN protocol: simple, fast, cleanly designed, and free of heavy legacy baggage. It stood out against monsters like IPsec and OpenVPN.…
WireSock Secure Connect 3.x: Beyond the Release Notes
On April 8, 2026, WireSock Secure Connect 3.4.4 was released as the first official version in the 3.x branch. For us, this is more than just…
Don’t Trust Third-Party VPNs: Deploying a Self-Hosted AmneziaWG with a Web Management Panel
A practical way to run AmneziaWG under your own control, with script-based deployment, local-first administration, and an optional web UI for routine user management. In short:…
2025
Cloudflare WARP via Dante SOCKS5: Unlocking Netflix Catalogs Abroad
When you find yourself abroad, whether on vacation, a business trip, or after relocating, you may suddenly discover that your usual Netflix library has “shrunk.” Some…
Configuring Dante as a SOCKS5 Proxy for Cloudflare WARP on Ubuntu 24
In this post we’ll walk through a stripped-down Dante SOCKS5 setup designed specifically for running WireGuard WARP traffic through a proxy. The idea is simple: we…
Unhelpful IP Helper: A Handle Leak Story
After my post about a CancelIoEx bug, I decided to cover another defect in Windows system components, this time in IP Helper (the part of the…
A Rare CancelIoEx Hang in Go on Windows
I don’t consider myself a Go expert and have only occasionally used this language, but I’d like to share a story about a bug at the…
ProxiFyre v2.0: Deferred Context Resolution and System-Wide SOCKS5 Tunneling
In recent months, I’ve continued to encounter cases where traditional VPN connections are becoming less reliable or outright blocked. For users who rely on remote access…
Bypass Censorship & DPI with WireSock Secure Connect on Windows
In a sense, this article is a continuation of a series of materials about implementing a WireGuard client based on Cloudflare BoringTun and a custom packet…
