How can I configure HTTPClient to authenticate against a SOCKS proxy?

Question

I need to set up proxy authentication against a SOCKS proxy. I found out this post giving instructions that appear to work with common HTTP proxies.

Answer 1

SOCKS is not supported by HttpClient 3 natively. You can try the SOCKS support in JDK as suggested by others. The side effect is that your whole JVM will go through the same SOCKS proxy.

Java 5 supports Username/Password authentication in SOCKS (type 2). All you have to do is to setup the authenticator like this,

Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticator() {
    protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
        return new PasswordAuthentication(username, password.toCharArray());
    }
});

Again, this may not work for you because it affects all authentication in your JVM (HTTP auth, Proxy Auth).