A robust link-translating proxy server mirroring the whole web

Link-translating proxies are widely used for anonymous browsing, policy circumvention and WebVPN functions. These are implemented by encoding the destination URL in the path of the URL submitted to the proxy and rewriting all links before returning the document to the client. Commonly these are based on the CGIProxy implementation or a variant. While popular, broken links and very slow load times are common. This is so, since the use of scripting languages makes finding and translating links (the essential task of such a proxy) very difficult. Some web-sites become entirely non-functional when loaded. This paper proposes a novel architecture for a linktranslating proxy. Using a sub-domain mapping technique we entirely eliminate the need to translate (or even find) relative links in content. Then, using robust absolute link rewriting, cookie re-assignment, and wildcard certificates we achieve an extremely robust and performant proxy. Our architecture preserves the same-origin polic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Ziqing Mao, Cormac Herley
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Destination Url, Robust Absolute Link, SAC 2010, Slow Load Times