Glossary · Networking
Proxy chaining
Routing traffic through more than one proxy in sequence, so each hop only knows its neighbours, not the whole path.
Proxy chaining sends your traffic through two or more proxies one after another. Each link in the chain sees only the hop before and the hop after it, so no single proxy knows both who you are and where you are ultimately going. It is the layering idea behind onion routing, applied deliberately.
The appeal is defence in depth: compromising one proxy does not unmask the whole path. The cost is latency, because every extra hop adds a round trip, and complexity, because a chain has more places to break or leak than a single proxy.
For most commercial proxy work a single well-chosen residential exit is enough, and chaining is overkill that mostly buys you slowness. It matters when the threat model genuinely requires that no one link can see the full route.
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