Hi Jonathan -

On Jul 30, 2009, Jonathan Bennett wrote:

>      First off, fwknop is a great piece of software. I'm using it in 
> several different environments, with no problems. However, I've found 
> one situation that does present a problem.
> 
>      A good friend of mine has a network in a non-ideal environment. 
> There is a forced, authenticating HTTP proxy, but it isn't transparent. 
> Any communication with the Internet has to go through that proxy, but 
> the http requests must be sent to the proxy.
> 
>      We've gotten OpenVPN through this proxy, using that program's built 
> in http encapsulation option. It also allows us to specify the proxy. I 
> am providing the endpoint for that VPN, however I would like to secure 
> my network here at home. I will leave port 80 open, and run a simple web 
> site on Apache. Fwknopd is quite content to watch the http traffic for a 
> valid SPA.
> 
>      I know that the --HTTP option in fwknop encapsulates a SPA in an 
> HTTP request. At the moment, however, I can't come up with a good way to 
> get that request to go through the proxy.

I suspect that the fwknop client is not able to create a "sufficiently
valid" HTTP request according to what the proxy requires.  For example,
fwknop does not ensure that the SPA packet data starts with "/", and it
also does not append, say, ".html" at the end (although hopefully the
proxy doesn't actually require the later since lots of web traffic
doesn't necessarily conform to this).  Also, if you are using GnuPG,
then the resulting SPA packet data is most likely about 1,000 bytes long,
so this may look suspicious to the proxy.  Do you know what rules the
proxy enforces?

You can monitor the requests the make it to your home webserver,
correct?  Can you try the following to see if the SPA data makes it
through the proxy?:

- Use the fwknop client to build an SPA packet, and use the "-v" option
  so that the SPA packet data will be printed on stdout.
- Take the SPA packet data and use wget on the command line to manually
  build an HTTP request with this data.  However, add "/" to the
  beginning of the data, and append ".html" to the end.
- You can try this with both Rijndael and GnuPG, but I would try with
  Rijndael first (just don't use any --gpg options).

Please note that -v works with the new fwknop-c client too.

If the above results in any of your SPA packets getting through the
proxy as a valid HTTP request, then I will add support for this to the
fwknop client (and the server will require a small modification too).

Oh, one more thing, the fwknop-1.9.12-pre6 release did include one small
change to build HTTP requests with SPA data such that the request uses
the pre-DNS resolution hostname instead of the IP (if you provided a
hostname with -D on the fwknop command line).  This change was made to
allow webservers to see the hostname so they can apply things like
virtual hosting configs, etc.

Thanks,

--Mike

> Thanks again,
> Jonathan Bennett
> 
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