Abstract This thesis is the result of work done on extending the capabilities of SOCKS protocol. SOCKS is an application layer network security protocol deployed in firewalls, standardized in Request For Comments (RFC) 1928 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as SOCKS Version 5. There are two proposed extensions to the SOCKS protocol made and implemented in this thesis. The first extension is the addition of multicast capabilities to the SOCKS protocol. The current standard of the...