RE: Reverse Proxy and Link Encoding

    Hi Amit

> There's a slight difference in the implementation though. We do
    not change
> the HTML pages so that links are pointing at AppShield. Rather,
    we let
> AppShield (instead of the original web server) have the IP that
    is exposed
> to the Internet, and then have AppShield forward the request to
    the web
> server (which is not accessible from the Internet). Thus, the
    HTML pages are
> not modified. In AppShield, we compare an incoming request to the
    links that
> we extracted from the HTML pages, and if a match is found, we
    forward the
> request.

    I think we both mean different applications. You seem to be talking     about
    a reverse proxy that is typically put into a DMZ and lets people     from the
    Internet (or other external networks) access web servers in a company's     internal network by mapping their web space into the proxy's web space.

    I, on the other hand, was talking about a proxy that would be used     to let
    people from an internal network access the Internet without having any     client-provided information leaving to the Internet (and thereby     ensuring
    that no hostile data like URL-based exploits threaten third parties'     public web servers).

You're right - AppShield is a reverse proxy, and I assumed this was the subject of the thread (whose title is "Reverse Proxy and Link Encoding"). I think you're talking about forward proxy. In the past, Sanctum considered the idea you suggested (that is, to offer a flavour of AppShield as a forward proxy server, protecting external sites from hacking from the internal zone), but this is not currently offered in AppShield. I suppose if there's a considerable traction to this feature, that we will reconsider.

Thanks,
-Amit Received on Mon Jun 9 18:55:49 2003