Tunnel Connections Inside HTTP
Break through draconian firewalls by using httptunnel.
If you’ve ever been on the road and found yourself in a place where the only connectivity to the outside world is through an incredibly restrictive firewall, you probably know the pain of trying to do anything other than sending and receiving email or basic web browsing.
Here’s where
httptunnel
(http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html)
comes to the rescue.
Httptunnel
is a
program that allows you to tunnel arbitrary connections through the
HTTP protocol to a remote host. This
is especially useful in situations like the one mentioned earlier,
when web access is allowed but all other services are
denied. Of course, you could just use any kind of tunneling
software and configure it to use port 80, but where would that leave
you if the firewall is actually a web
proxy? This is roughly the same as
an application-layer firewall, and will accept only valid HTTP
requests. Fortunately,
httptunnel
can deal with these as well.
To compile
httptunnel,
download the tarball and run
configure
and make
:
$tar xfz httptunnel-3.3.tar.gz
$cd httptunnel-3.3
$./configure && make
Install it by running make install
, which will
install everything under /usr/local
. If you want to install it somewhere else, you
can use the standard --prefix=
option to the
configure
script.
The httptunnel
client program is called
htc
, and the server is
hts
. As with ssh
[Hack #76]
,
httptunnel
can be used to listen on a local TCP port ...
Get Network Security Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.