Wwwproxy now supports secure connections and authentication

An underexposed functionality of the 1A-server is the wwwproxy. The primary function of wwwproxy is caching of visited websites. The content of the sites is stored locally which makes sure they will be loaded much faster on subsequent visits. Your Internet connection will be used more efficiently this way.

In most cases, connections are intercepted transparently through wwwproxy so users do not notice, nor not need to configure anything to take advantage of this feature. By default, this is only done for unencrypted websites (HTTP). Now it is possible to do this for encrypted websites (HTTPS) as well. Another new feature is the option to require that people have to log on before they are allowed to access the Internet.

There are observations about both new features:

  1. Encrypted Websites: when wwwfilter is enabled, blocked encrypted websites will not show the default block page, but a “tunnel connect error”. This is a security feature in all modern browsers and there is no better solution currently.
  2. Authentication: transparent interception does not work with this feature. The browser must be manually configured to use the proxy.

Wwwproxy is based on the open source software Squid, which has been around for many years and is accepted as a extremely stable and reliable software.

Wwwproxy can be extended with the following 1A-options:

  • wwwfilter: enables blocking of malicious websites.
  • wwwlog: reports on Internet use. This is the optional module Internet usage accounting.

Please contact your 1A-partner if you want to enable support for encrypted websites (HTTPS) and/or authentication.

Read more about Open Source Technology on the 1A-server »

Squid Proxy

Author

Richard de Vroede

A perfectionistic Jack-of-all-trades who dedicates all of his passion to his work.

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