NetCache is a transparent http caching proxy which my ISP uses. What I seemed to notice is that in an intercepted HTTP request, the _domain_ name in the request takes precedence over the actual destination IP address of original HTTP request packets. So for example if your browser tries to ask for www.securityfocus.com but the destination IP is actually something else (say: 198.137.240.92 coz you were naughty and fooled your computer), you will still get www.securityfocus.com. (This behaviour is quite inconvenient under certain circumstances - say you're trying to get a more useful set of banner adverts - like what's for lunch, meeting at 4pm, etc). Whereas if you use HTTPS, you bypass the proxies and get what you fooled your browser for. Has anyone else encountered this? In many transparent caching proxy setups, there's some filtering to prevent looping. But if I am correct about this behaviour it seems possible for someone to use this behaviour to cause looping. This is probably not a big deal of course. But there might be a few other interesting things one can do... Cheerio, Link.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Jul 23 2001 - 11:48:59 PDT