What is SOCKS5?
A flexible proxy protocol that supports any traffic type, including UDP, and is often preferred for performance and security over HTTP proxies.
SOCKS5 operates below the application layer. It forwards packets without parsing or rewriting them, which means it carries any protocol — HTTP, email, game traffic, peer-to-peer, DNS over UDP — rather than web requests alone.
Because it does no interpretation, it adds less overhead than an HTTP proxy and never mangles a request by rewriting headers. It also supports username and password authentication and can resolve DNS at the proxy, which avoids leaking the hostnames you look up to your local resolver.
SOCKS5 does not encrypt anything by itself. Traffic is protected only if the protocol running over it is, so HTTPS remains secure end to end while plain HTTP stays readable to whoever runs the proxy.
Related terms
HTTP/HTTPS Proxy
A proxy that handles web traffic. HTTPS connections are encrypted end-to-end, while HTTP is unencrypted unless the destination site uses TLS.
Proxy Server
An intermediary server that forwards your internet requests to target websites and returns their responses, masking your real IP address and location in the process.
Latency
The time it takes for a request to travel through a proxy to the target and back. Lower latency means faster responses; ISP and datacenter proxies achieve under 50ms.
Datacenter Proxy
A proxy hosted on cloud or server infrastructure rather than an ISP. It is the fastest and cheapest proxy type but the easiest for sites to detect.