4 ms·
How is this any better than the plethora of HTTPS VPNs which have been around for nearly two decades?
by simonjgreen 10y ago
How is this any better than the plethora of HTTPS VPNs which have been around for nearly two decades?
- gbuk2013 10y agoApples and oranges. This tool is a proxy not a VPN.
- peterwwillis 10y agoNot really better, just an alternative. Chisel is more than likely much faster anyway and does the same thing. HTTPS VPNs require TLS, and some proxies don't let you use TLS, because you might tunnel with it. It's pretty easy to block most HTTP tunneling because they typically use the CONNECT method. Ones that simply do an HTTP handshake and then pass the socket to a tunneling program can be detected or simply terminated after the session has gone on for a while or transferred a certain number of bytes. BOSH connections are a little more reliable, and I don't know off the top of my head if any tunneling apps support chunked encoding/multipart/etc, but it's possible to implement a tunnel using only valid HTTP methods, but it would be inefficient. Basically, most tunnels can be defeated without negative impact to regular users because HTTP isn't supposed to be used that way. In comes WebSockets. Since it's a part of the modern web, and disabling them would negatively affect user experiences on the web, you can abuse them to tunnel random crap and proxies can't really do anything about it. The protocol even allows for obfuscation to make it difficult to see what's going over the socket (though it was intended to prevent cache poisoning attacks). So in theory, if you can reach a target HTTP server, WebSockets may be the most reliable method to tunnel a connection over HTTP. The fact that it also supports multiple streams may make it faster than alternatives. And the fact that you don't need to use TLS may make it even faster, assuming the app you're tunneling does its own encryption.