66
votes
Accepted
What legitimate uses do browser proxies have?
One of the early uses of HTTP proxies was caching proxies in order to make better use of the expensive bandwidth and to speed up surfing by caching heavily used content near the user. I remember a ...
- 198k
50
votes
Accepted
Security Headers for a web API
Checking headers off a list is not the best technique to assert a site's security. Services like securityheaders.io can point you in the right direction but all they do is compare against a list of ...
- 44.6k
47
votes
Accepted
Why hasn't anyone taken over Tor yet?
They might do it already, there is a known technique to dedicate malicious and powerful nodes to the network to be able to take control of some of the traffic.
Tor does not advertise itself to be able ...
- 3,387
44
votes
What benefits are there to blocking most search engines?
In many jurisdictions, school districts are legally required to have web filtering in place. Google & Bing are two examples of companies who's "Safe Search" API has been around and stable for ...
- 803
37
votes
How is it possible to do TLS through proxy without anyone noticing?
Normally, when HTTPS is done through a proxy, this is done with the CONNECT mechanism: the client talks to the proxy and asks it to provide a bidirectional tunnel for bytes with the target system. In ...
- 172k
22
votes
How do I know if my company or my ISP is using a TLS proxy?
How to know if your company does TLS intercept
As the post you linked to explains, the proxy will decrypt all the traffic, and then encrypt it again but signed with another certificate. Therefore the ...
- 65.4k
21
votes
Accepted
Nmap through proxy
TL;DR: proxy support is limited right now but there are also theoretical limits of what you could do when using a proxy.
nmap can do only CONNECT and SOCKS4 and these protocols can do only TCP. ...
- 198k
20
votes
Accepted
How does a website detect proxy?
A proxy will by default tell the destination the IP address of the original requester by adding a X-Forwarded-For HTTP header to the original HTTP request. This make it obviously easy for the server, ...
- 19.2k
19
votes
Is systemd's hand-rolled Desktop-Bus-over-SSH tunnel a security worry?
Discussing this on Twitter is the modern day equivalent of Fermat discussing mathematical proofs via marginalia. So let us expand upon what Peter Wullinger did not have the space to fit into a margin ...
- 701
15
votes
Accepted
How is it possible to do TLS through proxy without anyone noticing?
Since version 1.1, HTTP supports a special method, CONNECT. This sets up the TLS tunnel through the proxy, even though your computer only directly connects to the proxy. HTTPS knows how to tunnel the ...
AviD♦
- 73.1k
15
votes
What legitimate uses do browser proxies have?
Some examples as follows:
To enable a firewall rule like 'proxy server to any destination on 80, 443' instead of from 'any internal to any external'
To monitor all websites visited through logs
To ...
- 3,159
14
votes
Are future TLS versions going to prevent traffic inspection?
TLS by itself protects the sniffing and modification of traffic between two endpoints, i.e. client and server. TLS interception just makes two TLS connections where only one was, i.e. client to ...
- 198k
12
votes
Accepted
Are future TLS versions going to prevent traffic inspection?
No.
AFAIK there is nothing inside the TLS 1.3 Draft about that. And I don't think there's a technical solution to this either. If you allow somebody to install an additional root CA on your computer, ...
- 18k
12
votes
Accepted
Why are HTTPS requests blocked by Firefox when using ZAP proxy?
ZAP creates certificates, on the fly, in the name of the site Firefox is going to.
Firefox is saying "I don't trust the CA that signed this cert", which is reasonable, because it's a MITM by an ...
- 72.7k
12
votes
Accepted
Why/how does Firefox bypass my employer's SSL decryption?
It's quite simple really, it's your employer that hasn't secured their network properly. I guess that they add a system proxy settings or they configured the other browsers to use their interception ...
- 31.4k
12
votes
What legitimate uses do browser proxies have?
For the "original" reason, think back to 1993, when Netscape 0.9 was released. It had a "Mail and Proxies" Options dialog (per a copy of the manual). At that time, most Internet links were 56-kbit or ...
- 721
10
votes
Nmap through proxy
For now, use an external tool like proxychains.
The nmap documentation for --proxies states, that the feature is not fully implemented yet:
Warning: this feature is still under development and has ...
- 44.6k
10
votes
What legitimate uses do browser proxies have?
Yes, they're frequently used in the corporate world. Perhaps less so now than in the past, but years ago they were commonly the only gateway from a local network to the Internet. In many cases only ...
- 35.7k
10
votes
Accepted
How do CORS proxy websites work?
The CORS policy is enforced by the browser, not by the server. The server just sets a couple of HTTP headers telling the browser how it wants it to behave. There is nothing that forces a proxyserver ...
- 65.4k
9
votes
Accepted
Why don't despotic countries simply block all encrypted traffic?
Because HTTPS underpins a lot of websites. Anywhere you authenticate, you should be using HTTPS. So that's things like:
banking
social media
government sites like tax submission
anything with an ...
- 4,727
9
votes
Accepted
httpoxy - does TLS/SSL mitigate the vulnerability of HTTP Proxy header?
I did not know about this until I read the link you posted, so do not view this answer as authorative. I would recommend you to take the precautions listed under "Immediate Mitigation" now, ...
- 65.4k
9
votes
Difference between socks5 and socks4 proxy?
From wikipedia:
The SOCKS5 protocol is defined in RFC 1928. It is an extension of the SOCKS4 protocol; it offers more choices for authentication and adds support for IPv6 and UDP, the latter of ...
- 198k
9
votes
Accepted
Disable or bypass SSL Pinning/Certificate Pinning on Android 6.0.1
Did you go through these procedures to get JustTrustMe to bypass the cert pinning -- http://www.welivesecurity.com/2016/09/08/avoid-certificate-pinning-latest-versions-android/ -- ?
If you are just ...
- 19k
9
votes
Difference between SSH Tunnel / Proxy and VPN in terms of security
SSH
SSH is at its heart a secure shell. It was originally designed as a encrypted successor to telnet. It can, however, do so so much more! For your uses, you are specifically looking at dynamic ...
- 7,682
9
votes
What benefits are there to blocking most search engines?
If the enterprise considers search engines which aren't Google and Bing "untrustworthy" for some reason (e.g., because they believe they are more likely to intentionally or unintentionally disclose ...
- 353
8
votes
Accepted
How does SSL Proxy server in company work?
I've never seen SSL warning in company
Did you verify that SSL interception is done at all? See How do I check that I have a direct SSL connection to a website?.
So how does they intercept trafic ...
- 198k
8
votes
Proxying MetaSploit through BurpSuite
Use the PROXIES environment variable (while in msfconsole) :
set PROXIES HTTP:127.0.0.1:8080
Or run Metalsploit with proxychains (config at /etc/proxychains.conf) http://proxychains.sourceforge.net
...
- 721
8
votes
How to intercept thick client application traffic (tcp or http[s])
This tool https://github.com/jrmdev/mitm_relay seems to do this. It uses a trick:
It embeddeds every request into a HTTP POST Request so you can relay it through burp and use every function of burp ...
- 552
8
votes
Difference between SSH Tunnel / Proxy and VPN in terms of security
People often speak of SSH tunneling as a poor man's VPN. It is exactly the same on a feature and security point of view: you establish a secure tunnel between the client and a relay host and let a ...
- 26.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible